Duke University Medical Center was ranked 10th on the U.S. News and World Report’s 2009-2010 Honor Roll of America’s Best Hospitals. But it has not been immune to serious mistakes this decade.
Surgeons at Duke University Hospital transplanted the heart and lungs of the wrong blood type into 17-year-old Jesica Santillan Feb. 7, 2003.
Santillan suffered from restrictive cardiomyopathy, which caused her to have an enlarged heart and weakened lungs. Her family moved illegally from Mexico to Durham in 2000 hoping to raise money for a transplant. But after several errors in communication, surgeons received blood type A organs and transplanted them into Santillan, who had type O blood. DUH officials took full responsibility for the error, and admitted that the chief surgeon in the operation did not ask whether the organs were a match when he received them. Santillan's body rejected the organs, and on Feb. 20, 2003 she received a rare—and controversial—second transplant. She suffered complications, and was pronounced brain dead and taken off life support Feb. 22.
Santillan's situation received national media attention after her family and their spokesperson alerted the press to the error and their treatment by DUH officials. In May 2003, Duke established a perpetual $4 million fund called the Jesica Santillan fund to honor her memory. University officials could not immediately respond to questions about the status of the fund. Santillan's family filed suit against the Hospital and settled for an undisclosed amount in June 2004. The error's surrounding the mismatch prompted Duke and the United Network for Organ Sharing to change their transplant procedures requiring more separate checks for compatibility.
Then in late 2004, DUHS was back in the media when Duke physicians used surgical instruments that had been mistakenly cleaned in elevator hydraulic
fluid. The instruments were used in November and December 2004 during procedures on 3,648 patients at Durham Regional Hospital and Duke Health Raleigh Hospital—both run by the Duke University Health System.
During an elevator inspection at the DUHS Raleigh hospital, a mechanic had drained hydraulic fluid into empty detergent barrels and did not relabel them. The barrels were sent back to the detergent supplier, which shipped them to four local hospitals. Only the barrels at Durham Regional and the Raleigh hospitals were used. The hydraulic fluid, produced by Exxon-Mobile and found to contain several carcinogens, was used in one part of the multi-step cleaning process of the tools. Multiple studies indicated the sterilization process was not compromised and exposed patients did not suffer resulting health problems. Still, at least two groups of patients filed suit against DUHS, one suit was settled out of court in June 2008 for an undisclosed sum.
Although DUHS is still considered a premier health care provider, these incidents greatly affected the hospital's and the University's image at the time and they should not go forgotten.
The problems for DUHS were number 7 on our stories of the decade list. These are the issues and events that made headlines for weeks at a time over the last ten years, those that sparked the most debate on campus and beyond, and the ones that we believe will continue to shape our coverage in the years to come.
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