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Opinion: Carlisle Regional and The Hospital System’s Duty To Protect The Vulnerable

Do medical facilities have an obligation and duty to be proactive be protect people, especially children, while they are patients at their facilities?  One Central Pennsylvania facility south of Harrisburg may not have been meeting this obligation. The following letter to the Editor can be found in the August 17, 2012 edition of the Harrisburg Patriot News.

Last week, The Patriot-News contained yet another article (Aug. 8) about adults allegedly failing to protect children and to hold abusers responsible.
This time it was Carlisle Regional Medical Center, which was cited by the Health Department for failing to report three cases of possible sexual abuse or assault, including two involving children age 4 or younger, to proper authorities.

According to the article, the medical center’s CEO said the Health Department’s findings were in error. He attributed the situations to “documentation errors” — yet the center has a new plan to ensure such errors don’t recur.

These new citations are the latest in a string of problems the medical center has had. In response to the series of critical Health Department reports, the medical center has, according to the CEO, installed a new chief nursing officer, a new emergency department medical director and a new emergency department nurse director. That must make all the people who were treated prior to the changes feel better.

Pennsylvania’s hospital systems have a duty to not just heal the sick, but also to protect the vulnerable. In this case, apparently one of them may have failed to do enough to protect children.>

SCOTT B. COOPER ESQ.
President, Pennsylvania Association for Justice
Harrisburg

If you have an injury or a loved one is injured or killed as a result of substandard care or actions which you believe was caused by negligent or reckless conduct, feel free to call the Pennsylvania injury lawyers from Schmidt Kramer who specialize in personal injury and can answer any questions you may have about inadequate care.

Schmidt Kramer – Ph: (717) 888-8888.