The Kaiser Anaheim Medical Center reached a milestone last week, although it's unlikely to be announced on the Lakeview Avenue facility's home page: It received its first administrative penalty from the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).
]
Though the $50,000 penalty was announced last week, the infractions are based on the results of a survey CDPH conducted in 2010, meaning the wheels of justice aren't alone in moving slowly.
“The hospital failed to ensure the health and safety of a patient when it did not follow policies and procedures for safe distribution and administration of medication,” CDPH announced.
Drilling down farther into the Statement of Deficiencies, one discovers the timing of the administration of anticoagulant medications for a patient who needed blot clots dissolved or reduced in size did not follow the drug manufacturer's guidelines. The unidentified patient, who had suffered a stroke, been admitted to Kaiser's Irvine hospital and then transferred to Anaheim, ultimately hemorrhaged and died.
Kaiser was given 10 days to appeal the CDPH, which was one of 10 issued to eight California hospitals last week. (Total fines: $775,000.)
None of the other hospitals were in Orange County, but the CDPH had previously disciplined these local facilities this year: Fountain Valley Medical Center and UCI Medical Center in Orange (fined $75,000 each) and Garden Grove Medical Center and St. Joseph Hospital of Orange ($50,000 each).
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.