Hepatitis Cases Spur Safety Measures

Kristen Diane Parker, a surgical technician, cruised for empty operating rooms at the Denver hospital where she worked. Parker would slip into the rooms and steal syringes of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller, replacing them with syringes she had filled with a saline solution. Parker, who has hepatitis C, allegedly had used those decoy syringes - the source of transmission, authorities believe - on at least 23 Coloradans now infected with the liver-damaging disease, according to her confession to investigators.

Failure To Conduct Adequate Pre-Employment Criminal Background Search Costs Assisted Living Facilty $750,000

A jury awarded $750,000 to a disabled man who was a resident at Cote De Neige Home for Adults after he was sexually assaulted by a worker at the facility. The lawsuit was brought against the assisted living facility for their failure to conduct an adequate pre-hiring background search before hiring a certified nursing assistant.

Lawmaker Says State Needs Background Checks For Nurses
A 7NEWS investigation has found a nurse accused of stealing medications from a Denver hospital lied on her nursing license application, and now a state lawmaker says the law should be changed.

HealthcareSource Extends Leadership in Healthcare Talent Management, Growing Over 40% in First-Half of 2009
In the second quarter, HealthcareSource launched a unique partner program for background screening vendors. This program provides value to clients by offering vendor integration without incurring additional fees.

Nurse fired for allegedly stealing drugs had been fired before

DENVER - A nurse fired from St. Anthony Central Hospital and arrested for stealing pain medication, was previously fired from Swedish Medical Center. A spokeswoman for Swedish says Jillian Fischer was fired January 28, 2008 for misconduct and was not eligible to be rehired at the hospital. She was suspended on January 3, 2008. > read more

Colorado Hep C victims may sue

A 10th case is identified, and lawyers look at Rose hospital's liability. Lawyers say that Parker's pre-employment screening by both Rose and the Audubon Surgery Center, where she worked after Rose, will be closely scrutinized should lawsuits develop. Rose was aware Parker had hepatitis C. Read more

A 10th case of hepatitis C in Colorado was linked to surgery at Rose Medical Center on Tuesday as the state health department continued to investigate new cases of the blood disease.

The latest victim of the hepatitis C outbreak — tied to a surgical technician accused of stealing syringes of the powerful painkiller Fentanyl and replacing them with her used syringes containing saline — is not one of the patients tested since Rose announced the breach Thursday.

Instead, the hepatitis C confirmation was from a prior test submitted to the state health department, said Ned Calonge, the state's chief medical officer. State investigators are interviewing all new hepatitis C victims to determine whether they had surgery at Rose during the time Kristen Diane Parker worked there.

So far, the 10 cases have been linked only through interviews with the patients and not through genetic sequencing, which the state is seeking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, lawyers say they are beginning to hear from people interested in their legal options.

"There is absolutely no excuse for a patient contracting hepatitis from a dirty needle in a hospital," said Jim Leventhal, a Denver lawyer who specializes in medical malpractice and has represented Colorado patients exposed to such deadly diseases as Creutzfeldt-Jakob and HIV during hospital stays.

"There are systems in place to prevent dirty needles in a hospital from ever getting used on patients, and in my opinion, there appears to be a system failure."

As many as 5,700 surgical patients at Rose and Audubon Surgery Center in Colorado Springs could have been exposed to the liver-crushing disease.

Victims could sue, but lawsuit caps apply

"The potential victims of this are petrified. Obviously there is great concern," said Larry Schoenwald, whose Schoenwald & Thompson firm has been contacted by patients who may have been exposed.

Those patients could file malpractice lawsuits against the medical facilities.

"I would not be surprised," said Dr. Eric Steiner, a medical doctor and Denver lawyer specializing in medical malpractice with Denver's Gerash Steiner & Toray firm. "We have to know what procedures were followed and what weren't. There are not enough facts right now to know."

Colorado law caps medical malpractice awards at $300,000 for noneconomic, or "pain and suffering," damages. Total awards are capped at $1 million, but a judge can allow higher awards. A legislative attempt to increase those caps, allowing patients to sue for more, fizzled in May.

Combine the wide-ranging impact of the disease, the speculation in assigning a value to a lifetime of potential care needed to treat and manage it and the fact that Colorado juries tend to eschew large malpractice awards, and there probably won't be record-setting decisions stemming from this case.

"I would say the chances for someone to get multiple millions of dollars from exposure in this situation would be very, very low," Steiner said.

Precautions too weak, lawyer charges

There are still grounds for a lawsuit, Leventhal said.

There are many cases across the country where drug-addicted employees have pilfered narcotics from hospitals, exposing patients to danger. And those cases have led to elaborate regulatory systems that both guard the drugs and protect patients.

There are, for example, hospitals that require signatures for each syringe used and there are needles that can only be used once, Leventhal said.

"There are dozens of different precautions that should have been in place and apparently were not in place that would have prevented this from happening," Leventhal said.

Lawyers say that Parker's pre-employment screening by both Rose and the Audubon Surgery Center, where she worked after Rose, will be closely scrutinized should lawsuits develop. Rose was aware Parker had hepatitis C.

"Did they ever wonder why she had hepatitis C?" Leventhal said. "I mean, look at her Myspace page, where she said she had a fascination with needles."

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com