Wills Eye Cited by State Surveyors

By Walter F. Roche Jr.

Philadelphia's Wills Eye Hospital has been cited for a series of rules violations including failure to provide appropriate and required radiology services for more than a half dozen patients.
In an 18-page report, state Health Department inspectors found that between November of last year and January of 2018 the hospital was shuttling patients to an outpatient radiology center located in the same building but run by the adjacent Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
Cathy Moss, the Wills spokeswoman, said that after the April inspection the hospital sought and obtained a waiver from the requirement to provide the radiology services in-house.
Moss said that while Wills "has a very large sophisticated imaging center that is fully utilized for our patients," the hospital has an agreement with Jefferson for "neurological imaging needs."
She said Wills own imaging department is for vision/eye-only imaging.
Moss said that the state had also approved Wills' corrective action plan for other violations cited in the April report.
Those other citations included the failure to verify the performance of pre-surgical patient anesthesia evaluations within 48 hours before surgery, failure for surgeons to verify a patient's identity after placement on the operating table and failure to document that a follow up anesthesia evaluation was performed within 24 hours following surgery.
"It was determined that the facility failed to ensure that patients had been identified by the surgeons after placement on the operating table prior to the procedure for 13 of 13 surgical records reviewed," the report states.
Moss characterized the citations as paperwork issues that did not impact the quality of patient care. The inspection, which began in February, was performed as part of the annual state license renewal process.
Still other deficiencies included the failure to include the names of participating fellows on consent forms and in one case there was no signed consent form.
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