Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center renewed focus on safety after Everett woman’s death

Published 11:29 pm Saturday, July 10, 2010

In Washington, two families have joined with hospitals to establish programs to improve safety and reduce medical errors — and both involved Everett patients.

One was Paramjit Singh, who donated $25,000 to a new $2.18 million fund established this year at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett to promote patient safety.

The other involved Mary McClinton, who died in 2004 at Seattle’s Virginia Mason Medical Center, after she was accidentally injected with an unmarked disinfectant rather than a dye used during surgery for a brain aneurysm.

Her death deeply affected executives and hospital staff, said Cathie Furman, a Virginia Mason senior vice president of quality. Like all hospitals, Virginia Mason had a patient safety and quality improvement program at the time of the accident, she said.

“What Mrs. McClinton did is provide a face to the numbers,” Furman said. “It galvanized and provided a focus and energy to make sure that never happened again to any of our patients.”

McClinton’s family filed a lawsuit, which was settled out of court. As part of that agreement, Virginia Mason began an annual patient safety award named in their mother’s honor. Family members have attended each of the award ceremonies, Furman said.

The program, now in its fifth year, has been awarded to recognize a variety of safety measures.

One involved the formation of a special team to identify patients whose combination of medical problems could cause them to go into cardiac arrest. “If we can get to the patient before they arrest, the chances that they get out of the hospital alive and well is significantly improved,” Furman said.

Other steps include programs to reduce blood infections from the administration of intravenous fluids, rapid response teams to get stroke patients arriving at the emergency room quick treatment, reducing infections following surgery, and programs to reduce the number of pressure sores, also called bed sores.

Pressure sores were once considered a normal complication, both in hospitals and nursing homes, she said. “In heath care, people didn’t pay much attention to it,” Furman said, even though an estimated 60,000 people die each year from the complications of pressure sores.

The number of Virginia Mason patients getting pressure sores — which once was as high as 8 percent — dropped to about 1 percent by 2009, she said.

Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3496, salyer@heraldnet.com.