New York Hospital Director fired after cancer screening tests bungle

May 23 2005

A flawed system at the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, which meant that hundreds of women were not informed of the results of their cancer screening tests has resulted in the firing of its executive director just a week after the slip up was discovered.

The dismissal of Joseph Orlando, 58, the director for a decade of the city-run hospital, is say city officials an attempt to restore the public's faith in Jacobi.

Alan Aviles, the acting director of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees Jacobi, says he hopes that the swift and decisive action to correct the inexcusable failure will help the center to begin to regain patients' trust. He says patients their safety and well-being must be the highest priority.

A hospital spokeswoman said Mr. Orlando was not available for comment. Corporation officials say they have exercised their right to terminate Mr. Orlando "without cause", as his contract stipulated.

Orlando's position will be temporarily taken over by William P. Walsh, who is the corporation's senior vice president of the Southern Brooklyn and Staten Island Health Network.

The action follows the announcement earlier this week that 307 women were not informed about abnormal results on Pap smear tests, a routine but important screening test for cervical cancer. Women who have abnormal results are advised to have more extensive testing to be sure they do not have cancer, but in this case, some women were not told of their results for more than a year.

Since the discovery of the mistake, all but one of the women have been notified, and hospital officials said that so far none had tested positive for cancer.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the mistake was unacceptable, and felt that people's lives were being played with, he raises the question of how adequate the chain of supervision was.

Jacobi's failure appears to have originated from a decision 16 months ago that a single clerk should be placed in charge of notifying thousands of patients about their results. During that period, about 20,000 Pap smear tests were conducted at the hospital. Of those, 5,207 showed abnormalities that would require follow-up care.

Hospital officials have admitted that no one at Jacobi had been monitoring the clerk, and that the problem had come to light only because one patient, upon realizing she had not been given her results, filed a formal complaint.

The deputy director of nursing services responsible for women's health services has also been fired along with another employee in a supervisory position, and two additional staff members. The hospital's chief operating officer and medical director have both received formal disciplinary warnings. The clerk who failed to inform patients has been suspended and is facing further disciplinary action.

In a statement, the Health and Hospitals Corporation said it had reviewed the other city-run hospitals to ensure that there were no similar problems and can confirm that all other H.H.C. hospitals are issuing appropriate, timely and well-documented notifications to patients about abnormal Pap test results.