King/Drew Patient Monitors Shut Off Following 2 Deaths
Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center is disconnecting a new $411,000 patient monitoring system whose alarms failed to alert nurses this summer that two patients needed urgent attention. The patients -- women ages 33 and 52 -- ultimately died.
The move comes just weeks after the manufacturer and Los Angeles County, which owns the hospital, stressed that a damaged part of the system had been replaced and it could be safely used. The equipment, including 22 bedside monitors, may be reactivated after a county health department investigation.
Relatives of both patients said Tuesday that they had not been told by anyone at the hospital that the monitors did not function as intended. They learned of the problems from a reporter this week.
The nurses "said the monitors were working fine and they showed her heart rate was fine at the time she had the heart attack," said Ana Lopez, whose 33-year-old sister Sonia died July 4. "How is everything fine if the monitors didn't alert [nurses]?"
Tuesday's announcement that the monitors would be pulled offline came on the same day that an accrediting organization was visiting the hospital in Willowbrook, just south of Watts, to determine whether its doctor-training programs should be allowed to continue. Although the review of the facility's 18 educational programs is unrelated to concerns about the monitors, it comes at an awkward time for a hospital hoping to make a good impression.
While the new monitoring system is being investigated, King/Drew will reinstall the 7-year-old monitors that were in use until June.
The decision to disconnect the new system was made, in part, because nurses were worried that it wasn't reliable, health officials said.
"The nurses are a little bit jittery about this equipment," said Laura Sarff, a nurse and director of quality improvement for the county Department of Health Services. "We just need to do some things to assure them and assure us that everything is OK."
The system was set up so that a central station received information from wireless bedside monitors tracking the blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen level and temperature of up to 60 patients. Typically, nurses depended on audible alarms to alert them of patients in distress.
Sarff said she had not received any reports of the monitors malfunctioning since the women died but that experts hired by the county needed to conduct additional tests.
