Health & Welfare | Daily Report

No California hospital sent parents home with the wrong baby and no patient was cared for by someone impersonating a licensed health provider, according to data that hospitals reported to the state.

However, a summary report [PDF] prepared by the state Department of Public Health shows that the most common problem in state hospitals is patients developing serious bedsores after admission.

The second-most common problem? Nearly 370 instances of leaving a foreign object, such as a sponge, in a patient after a surgery. In 53 instances, surgeons operated on the wrong body part.

These are just some of the surprising and interesting items that have cropped up since state law mandated hospitals to report serious "adverse events" to regulators.

California Watch obtained the data, which involves adverse events from July 2007 to July 2010, under the Public Records Act. The Department of Public Health keeps the data and will begin posting similar reports by 2015. You can see the tally of such incidents below or follow this link to see what has been reported by your local hospital.

As I also reported today, about 80 hospitals have reported no adverse events, meaning nothing went wrong during the three-year reporting period. Regulators will be asking them to confirm those reports.

Note: I removed the following columns from the data to make it easier to navigate and because they were quite uncommon. These are the omitted categories and number of times they occurred in the state from July 2007 to July 2010:

Surgery performed on the wrong patient: 4

Death or serious disability associated with the use of contaminated drug, device, or biologic: 1

Death or serious disability due to intravascular air embolism: 3

Infant discharged to the wrong person: 0

Death or serious disability associated with incompatible blood: 3

Death or serious disability associated with hyperbilirubinemia in neonates: 0

Death or serious disability due to spinal manipulation therapy: 1

Death or serious disability associated with electric shock: 1

Oxygen line contains wrong or toxic gas: 2

Care provided by someone impersonating a licensed health provider: 0