The hospital just hadn't done the paperwork. Dietl asked rhetorically. We saved a young woman, mother of three, who was stabbed by her husband. She lost 1.5 times her blood volume and she went home on the fifth day. She would not be alive today.
Nobody knows about it.
What the state report did find was that the hospital was deficient in developing written policies and procedures and did not have proper supervisory committees that it should have had during the three-month tenure of the heart program. At press time, Dietl and his wife were making travel arrangements. At the same time a few blocks away, St. Joseph officials were preparing to announce the hospital's affiliation with an established heart program out of the county and their intentions to reopen the Heart Institute this spring. They might not understand statistics and analyses and percentages. But to have 1.7 times the national average, that's OK for a small program.