I have nothing not one thing to say good about Harborview Medical Center in Seattle Washington. They are dangerous, deadly and utterly decrepit. Yes I have personal experience in their malfeseance but long before my near death experience at their hands they had a long history/legacy of being a dump of a hospital; However from that I began to actually look into the medical system and Pro Publica has been long established in this so I am not alone in my disdain regarding medical care. And hence that is why I am persistent in my complaints about the supposed great American medical system. It is if you are successfully treated then you think in those terms but until you aren’t you dont and no I was not I survived in spite of Harborview not because of them. It is during times like these I don’t believe many hospitals are very different and this pandemic has exposed them for what they are – insufficient, incompetent, hard-working, sometimes successful, many times not; Over priced, understaffed, under-trained and utterly unprepared for real disaster. Call them heroes if you choose but I call them medical professionals just doing their job and for some that is less than enough and for others it is more. I fear going in one of those facilities more than Corvid.
Harborview Medical is at the center of coronavirus outbreak. Here’s what you need to know
The death of the 54-year-old man at Harborview Medical Center, the ninth announced in Washington so far, has put the Seattle hospital in the spotlight. The hospital says that “potentially exposed staff” are being monitored and screened daily for the disease officially called COVID-19.
Harborview has faced critical inspections of its nursing staff and poor ratings for its emergency room. And this is not the first time the hospital has unwittingly exposed its staff to a disease. Last year, more than 150 workers in the Harborview operating room and the lab were tested and offered antibiotics after a lab worker dropped a test tube filled with potentially deadly bacteria in the hospital.
Days before Washington went onto high alarm because of the novel coronavirus, the 54-year-old man was being treated at Harborview. His caregivers at Harborview didn’t know it at the time, but he was positive for the virus. He died on Thursday
“We have determined that some staff may have been exposed while working in an intensive care unit where the patient had been treated,” UW Medicine said in a statement Tuesday. “We don’t believe that other patients were potentially exposed.”
The patient, who had underlying health problems, had recently been at Life Care Center, a nursing home in Kirkland, under quarantine after at least four patients died from the disease. About 50 people from the nursing home’s more than 100 residents and 180 staff are being monitored, public health officials said during the weekend, the Seattle Times reported.
Here’s what else we know about Harborview:
Major trauma center for the region
Harborview is a 433-bed public research hospital managed by the University of Washington School of Medicine. It’s the only Level I adult and pediatric trauma and verified burn center in the state of Washington, and it serves as a regional trauma and burn center for Alaska, Montana and Idaho.
It’s also the disaster preparedness and disaster control hospital for the city of Seattle and for King County. Last month, Harborview began sending out medical teams to make house calls to test people with symptoms of coronavirus. The five-person team — equipped protective gear, including respirators, full-body gowns and latex gloves — is designed to prevent infected people from coming to the emergency room and exposing others.
“Patients given priority for care include the non-English speaking poor; the uninsured or under-insured, victims of domestic violence or sexual assault; people incarcerated in King County’s jails; people with mental illness or substance abuse problems, particularly those treated involuntarily; people with sexually transmitted diseases; and those who require specialized emergency, trauma or burn care,” its website reads.
The Harborview Capital Planning Leadership Group recommended $1.74 billion in improvements to the facility, including a new tower, a behavioral health building and other renovations. The Seattle Times reports the county plans to seek financing through a bond measure as early as November.
How does it compare?
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare online ranking system, which tracks hospitals based on things like emergency room wait times, infection rates, costs and patient outcomes, gives the hospital an overall ranking of two out of five stars.
The hospital received poor marks for having a particularly overcrowded emergency department. The federal government noted the hospital struggles with emergency room wait times. It also has a high rate of patients leaving the department without being seen by a doctor and for having a “very high” emergency department volume.
Its rate of healthcare workers receiving a influenza vaccine was 81 percent, around 10 points below the Washington and national averages.
The hospital did have infection rates similar to the national benchmarks, and its death rates for common conditions like heart attacks, pneumonia and strokes were no different than the national rates, the federal government reported.
Lab worker exposes staff to bacteria
Last summer, 158 employees of Harborview were monitored and tested for potential exposure to brucella, a bacteria that can cause the infectious disease, brucellosis
The exposure occurred in an operating room and a laboratory at Harborview, after a lab worker dropped a test tube with brucella bacteria in it, KIRO reported. A patient had been transferred from another hospital to Harborview for an urgent operation and later tests revealed that person had brucellosis.
People can get the disease when they’re in contact with infected animals or animal products contaminated with the bacteria. No employees appeared to have contracted the disease; the workers were offered antibiotics as a precaution.
Data breach
Last year, the hospital was among those linked to a University of Washington Medicine data breach that led to the release of the information of more than 1 million patients.
The files were exposed Dec. 4, 2018, because of “an internal human error,” The Seattle Times reported.
UW Medicine said files contained patients’ medical-record numbers, names, a description of the information shared and a description of who received the data. The reports do not include more detailed personal information such as Social Security numbers, the hospital chain said.
State inspection reports
State inspectors have issued critical reports of the hospital a handful of times, state records show. The reports from the Washington State Department of Health show the hospital, among 90 in the state, was noted for two violations on March 5, 2019, and another on Feb. 15, 2019.
The violations from March include failing to document when and how they moved patients in their beds and around the hospital.
This task by the “patient handling team” was supervised by the nursing department, and is considered important because failing to note how they handled patients “created risk for patient harm” and protected staff from injuries while moving patients.
The March inspection also noted that the hospital failed to ensure a patient who had fractured both legs had received daily skin assessments for signs of discoloration and bed sores. “The patient reported severe to moderate pain levels from fractures, especially movement in bed,” the report stated. “Pain levels interfered with routine daily patient care, including required assessment.”
Recent lawsuit
In 2018, The Seattle Times reported a King County jury issued a $25 million judgment for a woman who went to Harborview Medical Center’s Stroke Center for treatment but became paraylzed during her stay.
Doctors in Montana had sent Jerri Woodring-Thueson to Seattle in October 2013 to get care at the stroke center, which UW Medicine calls the region’s first comprehensive stroke center. Her attorneys alleged her symptoms got worse during the stay and she was largely treated by inexperienced interns and residents, the Times reported.
Off the Rack Publishing 