Parkland Memorial Hospital – The Health Care Blog

Building a Better Parkland

Nov 15, 2012• 9

By Peter Pronovost, MD

In recent years, Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas has faced intense media scrutiny and government investigations into patient safety lapses. As the hospital searches for a new CEO, the Dallas Morning News asked me and other experts to answer the question: “What kind of leader does Parkland need to emerge as a stronger public hospital?” Below is the column, re-used with the newspaper’s permission. While it is focused on one hospital, the themes apply broadly. The type of leader that I describe is needed throughout health care.

Public hospitals such as Parkland are a public trust, serving the community’s health needs by providing safe and effective care to a population that lacks alternatives.

Major shortcomings in the quality of care provided at Parkland have eroded that trust. Now trust must be restored. The community is counting on it. It’s literally a matter of life and death.

Parkland’s board is searching for a new CEO to lead this journey. The CEO’s task will not be easy: Resources are tight, resident supervision is insufficient, staff morale is low, systems need updating, and preventable harm is far too common.

History may provide some guidance. Historian Rufus Fears notes that great leaders – leaders who changed the world – have four attributes: a bedrock of values, a clear moral compass, a compelling vision and the ability to inspire others to make the vision happen. Parkland needs one of these great leaders.

Have We Not Been Looking at Things We Should Have Seen?

Sep 13, 2011• 1

By PAUL LEVY

A remarkable aspect of the Parkland Memorial Hospital saga was the degree to which the hospital’s Board was not given information by senior management about the clinical outcomes in their hospital. The lack of transparency, in other words, even went to management’s relationship with its fiduciary board.

A recent article by the Dallas Morning News outlines some of these points:

On August 19, the hospital’s seven-member board of directors got its first chance to read the full report by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Almost 10 days had passed since [the CEO] first received the findings. As members began leafing through pages of the report, surprise, even shock, began to register.

The Chair of the board said, “We had direct culpability, but none of us even knew we were in the report.”

We’re From The Government. We’re Here To Help …

Sep 11, 2011• 5

By WHITECOAT, MD

The clock is ticking for Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas.

Earlier this month, Parkland was cited by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for several “serious threats” to patient safety. As a result, the hospital is now in jeopardy of losing its ability to participate in the Medicare program unless it submits “correction plans” to CMS by August 20, 2011.

According to a CMS spokesperson, two violations relating to infection control and emergency care issues were “so serious that they triggered ‘immediate jeopardy’” for the hospital. In fact, the reasons for the citation were so heinous that CMS won’t even disclose them to the public until Parkland submits plans on how to fix those super secret problems. That’s the subject of another WTF discussion, but we’ll save that one for later.

The event triggering the CMS investigation involved a schizophrenic psychiatric patient with a heart condition who died while in the emergency department. The report states that the technicians who subdued the man did not have “effective training” and that the patient was not closely monitored before his death.

According to the article and an interview Parkland’s Chief Medical Officer, Parkland was cited for several reasons. Based on what I can gather from the article, two of the hospital’s citations were for:

– Moving patients with less serious symptoms to a separate urgent care center for medical screening
– Staff touching a patient and then touching other surfaces that people would come into contact with

Think about how grave these dangers are.