![]() ![]() Top medical experts told reporters that the deaths appeared to reflect John Muir’s low patient volumes and inexperience treating exceptionally ill children. This past December, a Chronicle report detailed four children’s potentially preventable deaths at John Muir after the community hospital partnered with Stanford Medicine Children’s Health to open the PICU in 2015. DHCS said its records indicate John Muir’s PICU had 282 admissions in 2016 and that the agency considers that to be the correct count. Hospital officials declined to share supporting documents with The Chronicle, or to meet with reporters to review the data. John Muir, he said, had mistakenly undercounted the unit’s patient volumes when filing the critical, official data that the state uses to evaluate its approved PICUs. However, last month, when reporters asked John Muir officials why they had in the 2017 presentation shared a significantly larger number with the state, a spokesperson said for the first time that the 352 figure was accurate. Last October, John Muir told The Chronicle that its PICU admitted about 280 patients in 2016. But around the same time, John Muir also submitted an official report of its figures, stating that it had admitted 282 patients in 2016. New documents reviewed by The Chronicle show that when John Muir first made its bid for certification in 2017, it gave a presentation to DHCS officials claiming that its PICU had admitted 352 children the previous year - just enough to vault it over the threshold for certification. Instituted decades ago, the state’s minimum admissions requirement is meant to ensure that PICU doctors and nurses are treating enough children to maintain lifesaving skills and provide top-notch care. ![]() But in the years that followed, reporters found, the state maintained scant oversight over the unit and more than two dozen other state-certified PICUs, overlooking subpar patient caseloads. The coveted 2017 certification for the California Children’s Services program, or CCS, allowed John Muir’s PICU to boost profits and admit some of the state’s sickest patients. Fifth & Mission podcast: Scant California Oversight Preceded Child Patient Deaths.
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