Dallas' Parkland to release patient safety report

A long-awaited and highly critical federal government report on patient safety at Parkland Memorial Hospital will be released today at a special meeting of the hospital's board of managers. "We promised we would release it as soon as it was finished, and that's what we're doing," said Parkland spokeswoman April Foran. Two dozen teams of doctors, nurses, lawyers and other hospital employees have spent the last two weeks developing a plan to correct problems that federal healthcare inspectors said threatened patient safety at the Dallas County public hospital, she said. Investigators with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that Parkland put emergency room patients' lives at risk and failed to take sanitary measures, such as hand-washing, to prevent the spread of infection, according to an internal hospital memo circulated last week. Those were the most severe failures of nine regulatory violations found by CMS during a sweeping inspection of the hospital in July.