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This is downright scary.
A Detroit News investigation finds that Detroit Medical Center hospitals have struggled for years to properly clean surgical instruments, triggering fears about patient safety.
Karen Bouffard and Joel Kurth write:
The News has obtained more than 200 pages of internal emails and reports indicating that surgeons and staffers have complained for at least 11 years about improperly cleaned, broken and missing instruments. The complaints have continued under the tenure of the for-profit Tenet Healthcare of Dallas, Texas, which acquired the DMC in 2013, the documents show.
The records show improperly sterilized tools complicated operations from appendectomies and brain surgeries to cleft palate repair and spinal fusions. Patients were kept under anesthesia for up to an hour as staffers replaced instruments. Dozens of operations were canceled at the last minute, some after anesthesia was administered.
At least twice a child’s chest or skull was open for surgery when doctors discovered dirty instruments. In January 2015, open-heart surgery for a 7-month-old girl was interrupted at Children’s Hospital of Michigan because a tube leading to a bypass machine was clogged with blood from a previous operation.
