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SYRACUSE, New York — Imagine waking up from drug-induced coma, after weeks of depression and a suicide attempt, only to find a doctor with a scalpel ready to begin removing your organs.
That traumatic experience actually happened to 41-year-old Colleen Burns in 2009, when she was placed on the operating table even though she was still alive. Syracuse.com reports that the hospital was fined $6,000 for the incident after an investigation.
Burns ended up in St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center after a suicide attempt involving Xanax, a muscle relaxer and Benadryl. It was then that mistake after mistake led to her being declared brain dead. An investigation into the incident found that the hospital made several critical errors. According to Syracuse.com, some of those were:
- Staff skipped a recommended treatment to prevent the drugs the patient took from being absorbed by her stomach and intestines.
- Not enough testing was done to see if she was free of all drugs.
- Not enough brain scans were performed.
- Doctors ignored a nurse's observations indicating Burns was not dead and her condition was improving.
Related:
Hospital notifies wrong family of death, fails to apologize
A Utah woman says she was devastated because someone from a hospital told her that her husband had died in an accident. Turns out, that phone call was a mistake. The hospital had contacted the wrong family.Specifically, nurses told doctors that she showed signs of life, including moving lips, tongue and nostrils, as well as being able to breathe on her own. She was also given a sedative that was not noted on her chart.
The report also stated that the hospital didn't look into the near-fatal incident until forced to do so by the state.
"Despite this sequence of events, intensive objective peer review and root cause analysis of the case was not done by the hospital's quality assurance program until prompted by the Department of Health," stated a report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicate Services.
Burns ended up committing suicide just over a year later, according to mother Lucille Kuss. She said the incident had little effect on Burns.
"She was so depressed that it really didn't make any difference to her," Kuss said.
The state fined St. Josephe's in September, when they also got slammed with a $16,000 punishment for leaving a woman unattended who later fell and injured her head. The total $22,000 fine was the largest given to a central New York hospital in the last decade.
