Brooklyn, N.Y., Hospitals Fail Federal Checkup

Dec. 28–Brooklyn hospitals often fail to administer life-saving treatments for pneumonia and heart attacks, a new federal study has found.

Nine of the 15 Brooklyn hospitals that volunteered data for new Medicare ratings neglected to give most pneumonia patients an essential vaccine that cuts the chance of dying from the disease, the Daily News has found.

“It is astounding that many Brooklyn hospitals are not providing patients with basic care,” said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum.

“Failing to use proven remedies doesn’t just put a patient at risk,” she said, “it increases costs for the patient and the entire medical system.”

The Medicare project rated 4,000 hospitals across the nation to encourage the use of proven treatments for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia.

Those ailments were chosen because they are often deadly to the elderly, but the program will eventually be expanded to other diseases. The findings are available at www.cms.hhs.gov/quality/hospital.

At Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene, nearly 90 percent of patients weren’t given pneumonia vaccinations.

“This doesn’t surprise me,” said City Councilwoman Letitia James (WFP-Clinton Hill), who called for Council hearings into the issue. While her district leads the city with high rates of AIDS and diabetes, residents receive low quality health care, she said.

Brooklyn Hospital Center Medical Director Dr. John Carroll admitted that the low ratings demand “a major change in practice.”

“This is a good example of how you can take the data, and use it to start to improve,” Carroll said. In September, the hospital began to remind physicians to administer the vaccine, he said.

The hospital also gave only 46 percent of heart-attack patients aspirin when they were discharged — a cheap medicine that reduces by 25 percent the chance of dying of another heart attack.

But Carroll said the apparent deficiency was a statistical error. Heart-attack patients are often transferred to other hospitals for bypass or angioplasty surgeries, and the real figure is closer to 88 percent, he said.

At least one other hospital claimed that poor ratings were due to bureaucratic issues rather than neglect.

“With pneumococcal vaccinations, we have a little bit of a problem,” admitted Wyckoff Heights Medical Center Medical Director Dr. Nirmal Mattoo.

At the Bushwick hospital just 2 percent of pneumonia patients were given pneumococcal vaccinations.

Mattoo said that’s because pneumonia patients are mostly from nursing homes — where the vaccinations are supposed to be given. But he conceded the hospital had no way of knowing for sure if the nursing homes had given the shots.

“We did recognize this problem,” he said, “and next time we will be compliant.”

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