Reports of patient complications and deaths have put the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit at the Florida Johns Hopkins hospital in the spotlight.

Parents have learned that relatively routine procedures have ended with unexpected medical complications or even deaths for young children. This has led to an investigation into how many parents and children could have been affected by what some believe is widespread medical malpractice in the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology department.

A new report has identified that many young patients going to the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit were at risk of significant harm and fatalities. The Tampa Bay Times recently published an investigative story about the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit, identifying that across a two-year span in the pediatric heart program, the death rates tripled.

This spike in death rates occurred between 2015 and 2017. In total the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit was associated with the deaths of 11 patients who died shortly after undergoing heart procedures.

In addition to the fatalities linked to the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit, other outcomes indicated significant side effects and symptoms. The mortality rate was almost 10 percent in 2017, which was the highest any similar department in Florida had seen in the last 10 years.

Some of the other common outcomes reported in connection with the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Department included surgical wounds that were five times more likely to rupture, patients who were four times as likely than others to require oxygenation of the extracorporeal membrane, and stays required in the hospital that were twice as long as the average across Florida.

Reported Complaints

Numerous problems were reported in association with the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Unit, including warnings from staff members that started as early as 2015 about procedures that had been associated with preventable mistakes under the supervision of the surgeons that had recently been hired by the hospital.

Those complaints lodged by staff members within the All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology Department said that those physicians were allowed to continue operating despite the connection with negative outcomes.

One family was never even told that a surgical needle was left inside their infant’s aorta when she was sent home from the hospital, and another set of parents never learned about the diagnosis of pneumonia their daughter received in the hospital until they analyzed it in an autopsy report.

Eventually, the administrators at All Children’s Pediatric Cardiology acknowledged the issues in the program, discontinuing open heart surgeries and then sending more complicated cases to other locations. However, many different patients may have already suffered the consequences of the actions taken at this hospital.

Although the circumstances of the individual events might differ from one case to another, many of them involve allegations that could amount to negligence and improper actions that occurred during surgeries.