By Angela Marshall
An investigation was conducted in April after a member of the deceased's family filed a complaint against Mercy with the Health Department. Mercy said it is also conducting a thorough in-house investigation.
At about 3:25 a.m. last Oct. 16, an elderly Long Island woman with a history of cardiac problems was brought to the emergency room in severe respiratory distress. The patient, who had been in a nursing home, used a ventilator, but the per-diem agency nurse assigned to her at the hospital was not trained to care for ventilator-dependent patients.
Medications were prescribed for the patient at 7 a.m., but she did not receive many of them until that evening or the next day, and some not at all. The report says there is no evidence that she received her inhalers, ordered twice daily, or Nebulizer treatments, ordered every six hours.
According to the report, the patient began to experience difficulties just before 7 p.m., but no nurse responded to changes in the cardiac monitor strips or ringing alarms.
The cardiac monitor strips indicated that the patient had a marked change in her cardiac rate, rhythm and respiratory rate, the report states. This patient experienced a gradual and persistent decline in both her cardiac and respiratory status over a period of approximately 20 minutes, without any appropriate intervention.
Her distress was not discovered until 7:15 p.m., when, according to a published report, she was found by her son, who called the nurses. She was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit, but died 12 days later, on Oct. 28.
Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Health Department, said this is not the first time Mercy has been cited for some of the violations; there were four such charges in another investigation last year. Kenny said the Health Department is concerned about a systemic breakdown of the hospital's nursing care, including a lack of communication.
He added that many changes have already been put in place, but the hospital must provide a plan of correction by July 17. The Health Department will then conduct unannounced inspections.
We are reviewing the state report in depth, with experts from a number of medical disciplines assessing its findings, said Mercy's president and chief executive officer, Vincent DiRubbio, in a prepared statement. We will be analyzing the state document and responding to its conclusions after a thorough in-house investigation. We take its findings extremely seriously, but we believe that an overall review of the health care practices at Mercy Medical Center will find that the integrity of our health care has not been diminished in any way.
The Health Department is seeking to charge Mercy $2,000 per violation, for a maximum penalty of $32,000.
