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Doctor's Community Hospital in PG County has been fined. Regulators from the Maryland Health Department have issued the fines after the hospital failed to notify them that a patient had died and that seven other patients had suffered serious harm due to mistakes made by medical staff.
The fine, which was originally set at $95,000 was reduced to $30,000. The fine was paid by the surgical hospital, located in Lanham sometime last month. Why was it reduced? State officials reduced the penalty on the condition that the hospital uses the left over $65,000 to start a new patient safety program.
Officials blame the hospital's problems on lack of staffing. "We expect errors to occur," said Wendy Kronmiller, director of the state Office of Health Care Quality. "But we expect systems in place to catch them. What we found at Doctors is that the systems essentially didn't exist."
This fine is the first since the five years that Maryland began requiring its 69 hospitals to make public serious errors effecting patients.
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-Lynee Coan, GT NEWS
