Pierce County’s Good Samaritan Hospital comes clean on contaminant. That’s a good sign for transparency

Elective surgeries at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup are canceled for a two-week period until Dec. 3. Officials with Tacoma-based MultiCare Health System told a News Tribune reporter that “foreign matter” was detected on surgical trays.

The foreign matter turned out to be labels and flecks of what appeared to be white and black plastic, Marce Edwards, the health care system’s spokesperson, later told the Editorial Board.

Edwards said safety protocols worked as they should and assured us that no trays entered the operating room and no infectious agents were detected.

The hospital could have kept the entire incident under wraps, as patients were not exposed to the “foreign matter.” But Edwards said the hospital decided to go public and self-report to both The Joint Commission, the independent organization that accredits U.S. hospitals, and the Washington State Department of Health (DOH).

That openness is a welcome culture shift happening in hospitals across the country; instead of defending and deflecting when mistakes are made, hospital systems like MultiCare are trying to build trust through transparency.

And for good reason. In 2018, the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. was due to medical errors. According to a report by the Johns Hopkins Institute, an estimated 250,000 lives are lost each year from avoidable medical mistakes.

Certainly MultiCare’s non-defensive approach is preferable to alarming, after-the-fact reporting, like what came from Seattle Children’s Hospital last week.

Seattle Children’s CEO announced that six mold-related deaths and 14 infections occurred in the hospital since 2001. He acknowledged the hospital’s air-control systems were faulty.

Twice this year Seattle’s pediatric hospital has shut down its operating rooms, first in May and again this month, after detecting that more of the common mold Aspergillus remained in the air.

Just as sickening, records obtained by KING 5 News show that in 2018, Seattle Children’s instructed staff not to inform news agencies about the mold flowing through the ventilation system. The county public health department also failed to inform the public of the mold problem.

Washington law requires healthcare facilities report adverse events to DOH, but if that event doesn’t fall under the state’s 29 reportable errors, health care facilities aren’t obligated to contact the state.

And there is no penalty, outside of individual lawsuits, for hospital systems that ignore or violate the law; worse, non-reporting isn’t investigated.

According to the nonprofit Leapfrog Group — think Yelp reviews for hospitals — Washington is ranked 23rd in the U.S. for hospital safety, which means there’s plenty of room for improvement. The good news is that external pressures on hospitals have increased in recent years, spurring progress.

Say what you will about President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but the 2010 law came with accountability measures. Medicare now reduces payments to hospitals with higher-than-average rates of hospital-acquired infections, blood clots, falls or other injuries suffered by patients.

Pay-for-performance models are an effective incentive, as is the federal government’s five-star rating system. Unfortunately most area hospitals, like MultiCare’s Good Sam and Tacoma General Hospital, currently have two-star ratings.

What accounts for the low score? It’s complicated. The federal government employs a wide spectrum of quality measures related to customer satisfaction. And when people are sick, they’re often hard to please. Patient non-compliance and readmission rates also factor into the data.

“The opportunities to improve our performance have been identified,” MultiCare’s Edwards says, “and the teams are hard at work.” But she added, it could be “months or years until we see our improvement work reflected in these results.”

For what it’s worth, we give Good Sam an “A” for self-reporting. It’s a promising sign to see healthcare institutions move toward an era of transparency, because we’ve seen what happens when they don’t.