In the last three years, two hospitals operated by Trinity Health of New England have gotten more “immediate jeopardy” citations than any other hospitals in the state’s health system.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Katy Golvala to discuss her article, “Trinity Health cited most among CT hospitals for patient safety,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Katy’s story here.
WSHU: Hi, Katy. You say an earlier story by a Hartford Courant reporter prompted you to dig into this story further. Can you just tell us a little bit about that story?
KG: Yeah, definitely. That seems like a good place to start. So, last month, Livi Stanford in the Hartford Courant published a story about how St. Francis Hospital, a hospital in the north end of Hartford, has received nine immediate jeopardy citations since August 2023. Now, an immediate jeopardy citation is when federal inspectors or state inspectors, acting on behalf of the federal government, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, go into hospitals periodically. Sometimes it's on a schedule; other times it's in response to something that someone may have reported. They go into hospitals, and they check out what's going on, and immediate jeopardy is the most egregious citation they can give a hospital when they go in and survey it. And Livy outlined several of these specific instances, which you can find in publicly available reports. Some of these resulted in patient deaths, and that got me wondering: what else should we know about the hospitals in Connecticut?
And so, what I did was I pulled all the reports on hospital quality that are available through the state, going back through 2020, and looked at them, and you know, a couple different things stood out. Another hospital called Johnson Memorial is a rural hospital in Stafford, Connecticut, and is also owned by the same parent company as St. Francis Trinity Health of New England; they own both.
WSHU: Now Trinity Health New England is a subsidiary of Trinity Health, which is based in Michigan, right?
KG: Yeah, these hospital organizational charts can be like spider webs. So yes, Trinity Health is a national company that has 90 hospitals across 23 states. Trinity Health of New England is a subsidiary of Trinity Health that operates in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and so both Johnson Memorial and St. Francis account for the two hospitals that have the most immediate jeopardies since 2023 of any hospital in Connecticut, and so when you see two hospitals owned by the same parent company that are ranked one and two for these safety and quality issues, I think that's something that readers deserve to know and deserve to have laid out for them, and so that's what this story attempts to do.
WSHU: Now, tell us about the visit last week to St. Francis by Senator Saud Anwar (D-East Hartford). Who is he, and why was he visiting the hospital, and what did he find?
KG: Yeah, so Senator Anwar is the co-chair of the legislative Public Health Committee. He is also a physician himself, and you know he's been raising issues about St. Francis for several years. He has been asking St. Francis to have him there for a tour so he could see what was going on for himself. Now, in April, Trinity Health of New England had a big shakeup. They ousted their president and CEO of the health system, and they also ousted the president of St. Francis Hospital. Those two people have been replaced with longtime Trinity executives who are also physicians themselves, and they're saying that this shakeup and the new leadership is what is going to bring a new future for St. Francis. So, since that new leadership has been announced, Senator Anwar has been saying, you know, can you invite me to the hospital so I can see what's going on for myself? They invited a few reporters to tag along, and so I got to see what they had to show. They were very honest about the issues going on at St. Francis. So when we asked Trinity Health of New England for comment for this story, you know, they said that most of the issues at Johnson Memorial have been resolved, and the state gave the same kind of information. And so you know, even though we do write about quality issues at hospitals, I think it's also important to state that, in general, hospitals are safe places to go for care, and for the most part, people are receiving good care. But it's also important to highlight some of these quality issues.
WSHU: Talking about Johnson Memorial. It was the ICU that wasn't functioning, and that was because of a staffing issue. Could you just explain a little bit about that? Seems strange to me that an ICU was closed, but what happened here?
KG: Yeah. So basically, what happened is that a patient who came in with some shortness of breath, who was in a non-critical care unit in the hospital, ended up displaying signs of rapidly decreasing blood pressure, and the physician that was treating him said, "Okay, this is getting critical now. The patient needs this medication that needs to be administered by a nurse with a certain type of critical credentialing.” Those nurses are most often found in the ICU. And so, because the ICU was closed at the time, this patient was not able to get that medication for another four hours because they had to be transferred to a hospital with an ICU. Johnson Memorial says that now they have a system in place where the ICU might be closed if no one needs it, for example. But then, if a patient needs that ICU level of care, they have a system in place to open up the ICU.
WSHU: Well, Katy, I hope you'll continue to keep an eye on this and keep us informed because this is something that I know the general public is very concerned about.
KG: Absolutely, I think it's an important thing to keep an eye on for sure.
