Children's Heart institute putting kids in danger

[HaggardRN]

Despite warnings, All Children’s kept operating. Babies died. | Heartbroken | Investigations | Tampa Bay Times

This story breaks my heart! I don't work here, but some days I think my hospital is just moments away from getting their name on the front of the paper. Some days I just want to work at Target!

[psu_213, BSN, RN]

Don't take this as a defense of the hospital, merely a statement about this particular article. I'm not saying the article is wrong, I'm not saying that this actually is a good hospital.

I am not a expert in pediatric cardiology/cardiac surgery; however, I do know that it complicated. I think it may be a bit unfair to compare numbers from one facility to the next without any sort of context.

When I was a kid, the local paper in my hometown of approx. 100,000 people published data on the cardiac surgeons from the 2 hospitals in town. They singled out a surgeon who had some of the worse mortality numbers. It was brought to my attention by a family member (who was not involved in the data and has no connection to the surgeons, other than the fact she worked in one of the hospitals--the one that this particular surgeon did not work for) stated that this doctor is known for taking high risk candidates, which was reflected in his data. We can certainly question his judgment about taking high risk patients, but the article basically said, "his number are the worst, don't go to him," with no context or background given on said numbers.

Again, I'm not saying everything was fine at this hospital in Florida, but I'm going to reserve passing judgment until we know more about the nature of the patients--which is information we may never really know.

[HaggardRN]

I'm sure there is more to the story than we can ever know. And yes, I hear great things about the hospital in connection to other treatments. It does seem that as hospitals are expanding and becoming part of large corporations the interests of individual patients gets lost in the interest of business and expansion.

[Persephone Paige, ADN]

Heartbreaking

[Chrispy11, ASN, RN]

The last paragraph about the team from the top rated Texas Children's hospital coming to evaluate them. I believe Jen Arnold (From TLC's who "The Little Couple" might have been one of those people. On the show she moved from Houston to St. Pete's to become that hospital's medical director of healthcare simulation.

[KelRN215, BSN, RN]

At my last job, I was a liaison for a national home infusion company at a pediatric hospital in the Northeast. As much as I hated dealing with branches of my company in Florida (or Alabama and Oklahoma) when I had to send patients home to them on enteral or IV therapy, I was happy their parents had sought care for their children outside of their home state.

Several years ago I was also at an MLB game in Tampa and they announced that the first pitch was going to be thrown out by a teenager who had osteosarcoma and "nothing could be done for her." I so badly wanted to run on the field and tell this girl to get the hell out of Florida for a second opinion. I'm also not exaggerating when I say one of my patients from the aforementioned job had once gone home to Florida and was transferred back to us (some 1500 miles away) because the local pediatric hospital in Florida couldn't handle replacing her G-J tube when it came out.

[nuangel1, BSN, RN]

so sad and unneccessary