St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, a 189-bed hospital owned by Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare, has stopped performing elective heart surgeries pending an internal review, hospital officials said, according to a report from The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Here are four things to know about the issue.
1. The hospital did not disclose to The Philadelphia Inquirer what brought about the internal review.
2. News of the hospital stopping elective heart surgeries came a year after St. Christopher's decided not to take part in a Pennsylvania agency's first-ever evaluation of state hospitals that perform pediatric heart surgeries, according to the report. The organization was the only one of the five facilities that decided not to disclose how many of its patients died, though the hospital said then that it would be part of any future evaluations, according to the report.
3. The news also comes as the hospital is part of legal proceedings. In one pending case, a former employee, a specialist who operated the heart-lung machine during surgeries, alleges that from April 2007 through April 2009, 10 heart surgery patients at St. Christopher's died or suffered neurological complications because they were not adequately cared for, according to the report. Families of two babies who died after surgery at St. Christopher's — one in June 2011, the other in March 2012 — have also filed complaints against the hospital. According to the report, the hospital denies wrongdoing in all of the cases.
4. Although the hospital has stopped conducting elective heart surgeries, it still performs emergency heart surgery, according to hospital spokeswoman Kate Donaghy.
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