California hospitals with high infection rates have gone 5+ years without inspection

In California, 131 hospitals have gone at least five years without being inspection by public health officials, including 80 facilities that have reported significantly higher rates of hospital-acquired infections.

State law requires inspections by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) every three years. A petition filed January 23 by Consumers Union said the department needs to prioritize inspections for “the worst performing hospitals,” force hospitals to improve infection controls and share the infection data it collects with inspectors in a more timely manner.

“California law requires hospitals to report the rates of certain patient infections to CDPH, which discloses this information to the public through its Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI) Program,” the petition said. “CDPH recently disclosed that 19,847 patient infections were acquired in California hospitals in 2015, a fraction of all infections since not all infection types are reported.  CDPH has previously estimated that 72,000 to 87,000 hospital patients get infected every year and that 7,500 to 9,000 of them die during their hospitalization.”

Among the uninspected high infection rate hospitals are the 580-bed Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (once named the best West Coast hospital by U.S. News and World Report) and the 420-bed Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. Though the hospitals have been found to have higher infection rates than other facilities, CDPH said it doesn’t have authority to require improvements based on that data.

Consumers Union argued it can through a licensing program.

“CDPH’s Licensing and Certification (L&C) Program has enforcement authority but the Department deliberately does not provide inspectors with infection data reported by hospitals,” the petition said. “The L&C Program does not review the data prior to inspections or when investigating complaints. CDPH maintains a ‘firewall’ between the two programs based on the belief that sharing the information with inspectors would interfere with the HAI Program’s efforts to get hospitals to voluntarily improve infection control.”

CDPH told the Los Angeles Times it plans on responding to the petition within 30 days, though no explanation was given for the backlog of uninspected hospitals.

“Healthcare-associated infections are a serious public health issue, and we share concerns about the impacts they have on patients,” CDPH spokesperson Ali Bay said.