Orange County Global Medical Center, one of three trauma centers serving a county of 3.2 million people, was castigated by state regulators for substandard care and practices that led to at least one patient death and put hundreds of others at grave risk, the Southern California News Group has learned.

An investigation in February by the California Department of Public Health paints a troubling picture of the 282-bed hospital in Santa Ana that is a main treatment center for stroke patients and many of the county’s critically injured.

A blistering 177-page report detailed problems that occurred late last year and early this year, though the hospital has since satisfied the state that all of the issues have been substantially resolved. Among the deficiencies cited by CDPH were:

• The hospital routinely failed to pay contractors and suppliers, who then withheld services and equipment crucial to patient care. In one case, hundreds of lab samples went unprocessed for more than two weeks, including emergency tests to determine if patients had major illnesses, because the hospital had not paid its contracted laboratory. According to one lawsuit, a stroke patient did not get a needed brain catheter because the hospital was in arrears to the supplier.
• Medical staff inadvertently dislodged a patient’s tracheostomy tube during a routine test and were unable to reestablish it, causing the patient to die.
• The hospital failed for months to fix a broken heating system, leaving patients in the emergency department shivering in the winter and making it impossible to maintain the appropriate temperature and humidity ratio to prevent bacteria from growing and fires from erupting in the oxygen-rich operating rooms.
• Hospital administrators failed to repair a faulty water heater, resulting in a lack of hot water needed to sterilize instruments and for surgery staff to wash their hands.

Julie Siemers, a nationally recognized patient safety consultant who reviewed a list of the state’s findings at SCNG’s request, said the scope and breadth of the deficiencies at Orange County Global indicate a stunning patient safety crisis.

“The failures outlined at Orange County Global are not minor oversights — they represent a systemic collapse in patient safety,” said Siemers, founder of Fairfax, Virginia-based Lifebeat Solutions.

“A hospital with this level of dysfunction presents an unacceptable risk. Regulatory agencies should intervene swiftly to halt admissions and demand immediate remediation, or close, as needed.”