Another nail in the coffin

Another nail in the coffinAs I've written before, the Los Angeles Times is doing a bang-up job of exposing incompetence and worse at Southern California hospitals. The paper's stories on the scandalous, deadly performance of UC Irvine's liver transplant program already forced out the head of the hospital. Now the paper looks at the hospital's kidney program (Many kidneys turned down at UCI) and finds a similar story: the hospital turned down available kidneys at a very high rate, and many of the 35 patients who died on the waiting list could have done better elsewhere.Public reporting of hospital program quality is still in its infancy. Luckily the muckrakers at the Times are keeping hospitals on their toes in the meantime.