Kudos to LNP for editorial critical of Lancaster General Hospital

LNP editorial “Answers about Lancaster General Hospital’s shutdown are needed, and stat” observes:

“On this question, we defer to Jason Brown, the region’s emergency preparedness manager for the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania. He told LNP that hospital systems are generally designed with multiple ‘redundancies’ — an engineering practice of duplicating critical components in a system to ensure that even if some components fail, the system continues to work.

“ ‘’We continue to investigate how and why the hospital’s air-conditioning system unexpectedly reacted to the switch failure and pumped humid, outside air into the operating rooms,’ [LGH spokesmen John] Lines said, adding that the hospital has ‘implemented safeguards” to prevent this from happening again and has made “programmatic changes to mitigate the impact’ should it happen again.

“We hope the hospital finds answers, including one explaining why the failed and aging switch didn’t have a backup  (redundancies are needed precisely because of ‘unanticipated events’). And wasn’t there a plan for how to preserve the hospital’s internal environment should equipment fail? (Employees reported water running down the walls and pooling on the floors of operating rooms.)

Damage from this laxity, which may or may not be covered by insurance, will likely run into multiple millions of dollars.

It is gratifying to see one giant establishment member criticizing another. Perhaps someday John Lines will have something to say about the CRIZ program’s forthcoming give away of future tax payers funds to LNP for its downtown real estate ventures.  There is no “accident” there.