By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
In Friday’s Advance, we posted a widely-read story “Confidential MWHC Admin Emails Discuss Clinics’ Failure to Properly Sanitize Gynecological Instruments for Past Two Years—Maybe Longer,” with the subhead “Discovery Made Over the Summer, But Hospital Corporation Says It Hasn’t Informed Patients or the Virginia Department of Health.”
You can read or revisit the story HERE, after which you may have a number of follow-up questions. Here are ours, some of which were included in the original article, but so far not answered by MWHC, and some of which are prompted by the limited Mary Washington response:
1. Why did it take two years—and possibly longer as Dr. Kuhn acknowledged—before hospital staff and administrators discovered the lack of spore testing of autoclave machines, which CDC guidelines say should be tested at least once a week, more often with heavy use?
2. How will you be able to find out how far back the lack of spore testing actually goes? How far back to you have copies of test logs?
3. How do you account for proper spore testing and testing logs being maintained at the Cosner and Embrey locations, but not at Fredericksburg and Lee’s Hill?
4. Who made the discovery of the lack of spore-testing, and when was that? Who was responsible for the lack of spore-testing, and is that person or persons still employed at MWHC?
5. In your response to questions from The Advance, you wrote “Infection Prevention, Infectious Disease and external sterilization experts were consulted, and the machines underwent thorough inspection and testing.” What are the names of these experts? Please provide us with copies of their written reports.
6. You also wrote, “Repeated spore testing yielded negative results for all machines tested. MWHC also identified no evidence of sexually transmitted or other bacterial infections at either location related to this issue.” How did you go about attempting to identify evidence of sexually transmitted or other bacterial infections? Did you contact patients from two years ago? Five years ago? Who conducted this investigation?
7. You wrote, “Following its investigation and consultation with clinical experts, MWHC determined that notifying patients as well as the Department of Health was not needed.” Who made this determination, and on what basis? Please identify the “clinical experts” with whom you consulted.
8. And finally, for now, a layman’s review of NIH and CDC studies indicates that between 2/100 and 2/1000 spore tests on medical device autoclaves fail, with more than 90 percent of the failures attributable to human error. What studies are you and your clinical experts citing in your decision not to notify patients or regulators about this years-long testing failure?
We look forward to sharing MWHC’s responses with our readers.
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Steve Watkins is editor of The FXBG Advance. You can contact him HERE.
