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Hospitals Violate Law, Do Not Report Medical Errors

On September 29, 2004, the New York Times reported that an audit by the state’s comptroller found that hospitals in New York routinely violate a New York State law requiring them to promptly report medical errors that have occurred.

The audit found thousands of instances where hospitals either did not report, or delayed for weeks or even months, reports of patient deaths and mistaken surgery that may have been crucial to investigations trying to determine what went wrong.

According to the comptroller, the State Health Department did not make or follow rules as to how and when to punish violators. As a result, they only punished the hospitals on very few occasions.

Between January 2001 and May 2003, nearly 66,000 mistakes were reported. According to the audit while there were thousands of law violations in that period, the State Health Department only fined 2 hospitals and issued citations against 37.

More than 5000 of the cases were of the type that should have been reported within 24 hours. 84% of them were reported an average of 40 days late. One case, in particular, was reported more than two years late.

In the more serious cases, involving death or surgery on the wrong part of the body, hospitals are required to investigate and file a thorough report to the state within 30 days (a 15 day extension is allowed if necessary). In more than half of these cases deadlines were missed and in 11% of the cases the investigative reports were never filed at all. Those that were filed were often incomplete.

A State Health Department spokesman, William Van Slyke, said, “We welcome, of course, any critique by the comptroller’s office, but to paint this as anything other than an already excellent program would be a mischaracterization.”

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