A Detroit News report last week was a big stain on Detroit Medical Center's reputation. It pointed out that surgeons and staffers have for years been concerned about dirty, broken and missing surgical tools that sometimes resulted in delays in surgeries, and even kept people under anesthesia for a longer time.
It also left unanswered questions about Mike Duggan's tenure as CEO and president of the hospital from 2004 to 2012. He was elected mayor in November 2013.
Now, Mike Duggan, who headed up the hospital before becoming mayor, has weighed in on the issue, telling Joel Kurth of The News that he “dramatically cut the problems” with surgical instruments when he was president and CEO of the DMC.
The News reports:
In his first statements since The Detroit News published the results of an investigation last week into a decade of complaints about surgical instruments at the DMC, Duggan said instrument sterilization was a “huge point of emphasis” when he ran the hospital system from 2004 to 2012.
“There was nothing in The Detroit News that had any specifics regarding my time at the DMC beyond general statements but ... every major hospital system in the country knows processing surgical instruments is a very human and very complex process,” said Duggan, responding to questions during a media event in northeast Detroit about expanded bus service.
Duggan’s remarks followed statements of “no comments” from his staff last week after The News published a two-day series detailing doctor complaints about dirty instruments. The issues centered on the five hospitals in the DMC’s Midtown campus: Children’s Hospital of Michigan, Detroit Receiving, Harper University, Hutzel Women’s and DMC Heart hospitals.
Based on more than 200 pages of emails and internal reports and dozens of interviews, the articles showed improperly sterilized tools complicated operations from appendectomies and brain surgeries to cleft palate repair and spinal fusions, kept patients under anesthesia for up to an hour as instruments were replaced and canceled dozens of operations at the last minute, some after anesthesia was administered.
Emails printed in the articles did not directly overlap with Duggan’s tenure. But they repeatedly referred to problems as longstanding, including a 2013 email from Children’s Hospital of Michigan chief surgeon Joseph Lelli that asked: “Who has the will to solve this problem that has not been solved in the 11 years I have been at CHM?”
