LAWSUIT ALLEGES DIRTY INSTRUMENTS CAUSED HUNDREDS OF INFECTIONS (Orthopedics This Week)
Sixty-seven patients have filed a lawsuit against Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, Colorado, alleging that they developed serious infections at their surgical sites or in their bloodstream because of improper cleaning and sterilization.
The patients, all of whom underwent surgery at Porter Adventist Hospital between 2015 and 2018, alleged that they developed serious infections including hepatitis B, meningitis, and urinary tract, E. coli and staph infections. The lawsuit claims that one patient died after developing sepsis and pneumonia following surgery for a fractured femur.
In 2018, the hospital sent warning letters to 5,800 patients, acknowledging that it had problems with its surgical sterilization procedures for its orthopedic and spine surgeries and that they may have been at risk for contracting HIV, hepatitis, or a surgical site infection. The hospital said that the risk of patients contracting any infections was “very low.”
However, according to Porter Adventist Hospital's own data, it performed 14,805 surgeries during the period in which contamination issues were known to have exi...
