Connecticut Hospital Mistakes Withheld from Public

Thousands of severe injuries and deaths caused by preventable hospital mistakes in Connecticut have been withheld from the public following revisions to a state law that was allegedly designed to keep the public informed about the quality of care at the state’s hospitals and to encourage facilities to improve their care.

An investigation by the Hartford Courant found that hospital errors, including those that resulted in more than 50 deaths, are being kept from the public due to changes to the state’s adverse event reporting law that were enacted five years ago. Many of the unreported medical mistakes are “never events” – or errors that should never occur if the proper standards of medical care are followed.

The law was originally passed in 2002 to force hospitals to honestly report all serious medical errors to the public. However, the revelations of medical mistakes in the wake of the law caused hospitals to balk, according to the Courant investigation, and hospital lobbyists convinced state lawmakers to change the law in 2004. The state saw a 90% drop in the number of hospital errors being reported following the changes, which allow hospitals to police themselves as far as what’s being reported, and keep secret any error that does not result in a state investigation.

The investigation found numerous deaths resulting from hospital error went unreported and uninvestigated, including cases where patients died due to medication mistakes and bled to death after having arteries mistakenly severed. So-called “never events,” such as surgery errors where sponges or surgical instruments are left inside the patients’ bodies, also often went unreported.

While hospital and state officials say that Connecticut hospitals are meeting the requirements of the reporting law and that the low numbers are a good sign, patient advocates and other critics say that the law has been so narrowly redefined that only the most egregious errors have even the slightest chance of seeing daylight, and many of those are likely never reported to the state either. Additionally, the state does not appear to have the resources or motivation to investigate whether the hospitals are adhering to the law.

The problem is similar to those being experienced by states nationwide, and on a national level as well. More than 20 states have similar reporting laws on the books. There is a federal National Practitioner Data Bank, which requires that hospitals report disciplinary actions taken against physicians.

In June, the Washington Post ran a report about the failure of Maryland hospitals to report medical mistakes. The Post found that only one hospital had been fined for failing to report in the five years the law had been in place.

According to a report by the consumer advocacy group, Public Citizen, hospitals also routinely fail to report disciplinary actions taken against their physicians as required by law. The group indicated that many hospitals exploit loopholes in the law and off-the-record disciplinary actions to avoid reporting, depriving state medical boards of information needed to protect patients from a potential risk of medical malpractice.