…and it was for being naughty. As in endangering patients, and being overall negligent. It’s high time that rules and regulations were enforced. The fine is $25,000, which isn’t a huge amount of money but still a real sum–like half a year’s salary for a nurse.

From the Mercury News:

LOS ANGELES—The California Department of Public Health issued fines to 10 hospitals Tuesday for health code violations ranging from poor food refrigeration to leaving foreign objects inside patients during surgery.

Each violation carries a $25,000 fine. Hospitals have the right to appeal the citations by March 13, but none has ever been appealed successfully.

All cited hospitals must submit a plan of correction to the state, addressing the violation.

Since Jan. 1, 2007, the state has issued 71 such violations to 49 California hospitals.

The article then goes on to describe the various violations. For example, at Bakersfield Memorial Hospital, the hospital’s anesthesia equipment didn’t function properly, which was discovered while a team was performing an endovascular aneurysm repair on March 10, 2008. Nice, I wouldn’t have wanted to be that patient.

At Marin General Hospital, the hospital “failed to follow its own policy to count sponges used in surgery, resulting in a lap pad sponge being left in a patient’s abdominal cavity after surgery.”

And a really sad one–at Northbay Vacavalley Hospital, the hospital didn’t follow procedures to prevent a fall, in which a patient was left unattended, fell off a bedside commode and re-fractured his left hip.

A patient recovering from a fractured hip was left alone on a commode?

As I said, its good that these things are getting spotted, reported, the hospital fined, and supposedly, being rectified so they don’t happen again.