Only one way for Madera hospital to cure its tarnished reputation: clean house | Opinion
Over the last week, the somewhat confusing saga of Madera Community Hospital finally started making sense.
Now we really know why Madera County’s only general hospital shut down last December, filed Chapter 11 in March and is presently twisting in the wind.
The place was a disaster.
I’m able to make that statement because Bee reporters Melissa Montalvo and Erik Galicia took a deep dive into recent hospital inspection records compiled by the California Department of Public Health. Their reporting detailed numerous incidents and violations at Madera Community, some of them quite horrifying, which ultimately can only be blamed on incompetent management.
The same incompetent management that continues to draw paychecks while the hospital’s future winds its way through bankruptcy proceedings.
Karen Paolinelli has served as the hospital’s CEO since 2018. During that time, Madera Community has been hit with at least six violations so serious they carry “immediate jeopardy” designations in state hospital records.
Here’s how to contextualize those six violations: A 2021 journal-published study that tracked hospital inspections nationwide over a 10-year period found 730 “immediate jeopardy” incidents.
The conclusion one can draw is these types of violations are pretty rare. Just not at Madera hospital, where they were pretty regular.
The hospital employed a surgeon that didn’t bother to read a patient’s medical report before removing the wrong end of his cancerous colon. It employed a nurse that forcefully inserted a catheter designed for women inside a male patient’s anus, then punched him in the testicles in front of four security officers. It failed to prevent a suicidal patient from hanging himself from a bedsheet, then failed again to take corrective actions.
And that’s only the half of it.
Is CEO the root cause?
Paolinelli, in an emailed statement responding to the litany of violations under her watch, maintained that managers in the “key areas of concern” were replaced. And that the hospital “always took responsibility” for the events that occurred.
“Any time there was an incident, the hospital would immediately initiate a thorough investigation into the matter and a root-cause analysis would be completed,” Paolinelli said.
That’s all well and good. But how many thorough investigations and analyses have to occur until the root cause can’t emanate anywhere else besides the CEO making a $359,668 salary?
“The hospital failed to have an effective Governing Body responsible for the conduct of the hospital,” a state investigator noted in response to the series of “immediate jeopardy” violations in 2020.
The collapse of Madera Community Hospital has meant that 160,000 people, if they can afford it, must drive longer distances to seek medical care and treatment. It has also impacted Fresno-area hospitals compelled to pick up the slack, and left the region without an emergency room between Fresno and Merced.
So great is the need, the hospital was able to secure $52 million in emergency loans from the state including a $2 million “bridge loan” to cover operational costs (including salaries of remaining staff) during this period of uncertainty.
The future of Madera hospital will ultimately be decided by a bankruptcy court judge after sifting through contract offers from health-service providers aiming to take over its management. Adventist Health and American Advanced Management, Inc., have each made their interest known, and there may be a mystery suitor.
That decision will surely be based on several factors. But now that the repeated violations that placed patients in harm’s way during the years leading to the hospital’s financial collapse are widely known, the current management cannot be allowed to participate in its rebirth.
The new era must start at the top. That’s the only cure for Madera Community Hospital to completely heal its tarnished reputation.
