Hospitals

By her own admission, Kristen Diane Parker cruised for empty operating rooms at the Denver hospital where she worked. The surgical technician would slip into the rooms and steal syringes of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller, replacing them with syringes she'd filled with saline, she later confessed to investigators. Parker, who has hepatitis C, had allegedly used those decoy syringes -- the source of transmission, authorities believe, for at least 23 Coloradans now infected with the liver-damaging disease.

A Torrance hospital held a baby shower this week for an unlikely addition: A 7-pound robotic baby named Simantha. The $35,000 baby "born" May 30 will serve as an educational tool for students and staff members in the clinical skills lab at Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Simantha joins three robotic adults: Stan D. Ardman (a play on the phrase "standard man"), Brittnay and Jake, who is called Jessica when staff members use her as a female. John Edwards, the clinical skills simulation technician who runs the lab and maintains the robots, was beaming like a proud father at the baby shower, he said.

Six Southern California hospitals have been fined $25,000 each in administrative penalties for serious violations that, in some cases, led to death or serious injury, according to state Department of Public Health officials. Children's Hospital of Orange County was fined because its nursing staff failed to ensure appropriate drainage after a child's neurological procedure in November, an oversight that led to severe brain injury. Dr. Maria Minon, the hospital's chief medical officer, said the hospital "very much" regrets the incident and has adjusted protocols for patient care, increased staff training and added layers of checks and balances to minimize the chance of it occurring again.

The bride wasn't the only one wearing a gown. An intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center was the scene Saturday morning of a wedding designed around the bride's bedridden father, hospitalized since early July with a rare neuromuscular disorder. When Janette Villalobos, 20, realized that her father, Johnny, would not be able to attend her planned backyard wedding and barbecue in San Dimas, she and fiance Michael Arroyo decided to take the nuptials to him. They felt some urgency because Arroyo, 26, a Navy corpsman stationed in Twentynine Palms, is scheduled to leave Oct. 6 for a 14-month deployment in Afghanistan.

A proposal is sitting on the governor's desk that would smack state hospitals with billions of dollars in new fees -- and hospital officials are begging Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign it into law. In fact, they thought it up. In the latest test of anti-tax groups' clout in the Capitol, however, fiscal conservatives are trying to persuade the governor to block the new levies on the institutions that want them. At the root of the dispute is a plan by the hospitals to access $2 billion in federal funds.

Alarmed by the spread of the H1N1 flu, hospitals throughout California and neighboring states restricted visitors this week, barring children and capping the number of visitors per patient. In Los Angeles, Cedars- Sinai Medical Center on Monday raised the minimum age for visitors from 12 to 18 and restricted the number of visitors for patients at greatest risk for H1N1, including those in labor and delivery, or in the pediatric and neonatal intensive care units. "This epidemic is different from the typical flu season, and we're having to respond in a different way," said Dr. Rekha Murthy, Cedars-Sinai's medical director of hospital epidemiology.

Kaiser Permanente unveiled plans Thursday for a $10-million medical office building that will offer primary care, some specialty care and other services to 80,000 South Los Angeles residents who are members of Kaiser's healthcare plan. Kaiser's 15,000-square-foot South Los Angeles medical offices are expected to open in 2011 on the southeast corner of West Manchester and South Denker avenues. A vacant building on the site will be torn down to make way for the new facility. Construction is scheduled to begin soon.

Paramedics on Monday began transporting suspected stroke victims in Los Angeles County to the nearest certified stroke center, a change that officials hope will save lives and brings L.A. into line with other urban counties in the state. The policy shift will route patients to 10 hospitals, including one in Orange County, that have a specialized stroke neurologist available at all times. Those facilities can run blood tests and brain scans, as well as offer rehabilitation services, said Dr.

A Japanese bicyclist who suffered head and back injuries when he collided with a motorcycle waited in an ambulance as paramedics phoned 14 hospitals, all of which refused to treat him, officials said. He died 90 minutes later of shock from loss of blood at a facility that finally agreed to take him. Mitsuhisa Ikemoto, a fire department official, said the hospitals cited a lack of equipment and staff in refusing to admit the 69-year-old victim. The Jan. 20 incident in the southwestern city of Itami was the latest in a string of cases in which patients were denied treatment at understaffed and overcrowded hospitals.

Fishermen helped Red Cross workers ferry about 240 patients from a shelled Sri Lankan hospital to a boat anchored off Putumattalan to evacuate them from the war zone, a Red Cross spokeswoman said. At least 16 patients being treated at the makeshift hospital in the northern war zone were killed by shelling Monday, the Red Cross said. The United Nations said it was outraged by hundreds of "unnecessary" deaths in Tamil Tiger rebel territory and called on both sides to avoid fighting in civilian areas.