Since it was acquired by Johns Hopkins, All Children’s Hospital Heart Institute has experienced an alarming spike in mortality rates.

Until a few years ago, All Children’s Hospital Heart Institute in St. Petersburg was known in Florida for its reliability during one of a family’s toughest moments — a child’s heart surgery. Unfortunately, that reputation has changed since Johns Hopkins acquired the hospital in 2012, according to an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times.

Recently, it has been reported that mortality rates and cases of complications in pediatric heart surgery have risen sharply since Johns Hopkins took over. Johns Hopkins is known around the world for the quality of its care and is recognized for being state-of-the-art. So when it acquired All Children’s Hospital, the community, and its doctors, assumed that the quality of care would only increase.

In fact, Johns Hopkins proudly advertised that it intended to make the hospital into one of the nation’s finest hospitals for children’s heart surgeries. Strangely, this turned out not to be the case. The Tampa Bay Times reported that the mortality rate at the All Children’s Hospital Heart Institute tripled between 2015 and 2017.

Johns Hopkins replaced a number of hospital administrators and surgeons, and radically restructured how the hospital team divided up surgeries. Before Johns Hopkins took over, the most senior surgeons took the most difficult cases, and the less senior surgeons handled the simpler or more routine cases. After the change in ownership, the surgeries were divided up evenly among surgeons, with the less senior surgeons handling some of the riskiest surgeries, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

After Johns Hopkins acquired the hospital, they allegedly demoted and later dismissed their most successful and senior surgeon, and eventually replaced him with a surgeon who had a reportedly inconsistent record and whose clinical privileges had been suspended in a previous role over allegations that he had “disrupted patient care and educational facilities.” Nonetheless, he was given a role at All Children’s Hospital Heart Institute, which Johns Hopkins had promised to make a “top-flight, excellent program that could provide unique care for children.”

According to the Tampa Bay Times, Johns Hopkins disregarded safety concerns brought up by staff and allegedly chose to hire administrators who would turn a blind eye to potential problems. Some families even reported that the hospital failed to disclose information to parents about their children’s health.

Hospital staff reportedly worried that disrupting the “chemistry” of the surgical department was a large part of why the hospital developed so many problems so quickly.

In one case, parents of a child who had passed away after a heart surgery were made aware in her autopsy report that their daughter had developed pneumonia. Allegedly, they had not been made aware of that fact before that point.

Eventually, the hospital stopped performing more complex surgeries, only performing simple ones. All Children’s CEO Dr. Jonathan Ellen told the Tampa Bay Times that this strategy meant that the hospital had “self-policed our way out” of heart surgeries, and claimed that the All Children’s Hospital Heart Institute had its “challenges” under control.

However, this measure could not help families of children who had already suffered from unexpected surgical complications.