Patients at unsanitary surgery center await results of tests for HIV and hepatitis
Lindy WashburnEditor's note: We would like to hear from patients and employees at HealthPlus Surgery Center. Please contact reporter Lindy Washburn at washburn@northjersey.com or 973-569-7795.
Hundreds of patients in New Jersey and New York waited Monday for test results to learn whether they had contracted HIV or hepatitis from poor sterilization and sanitary procedures at a Saddle Brook surgery center, after letters from the facility around Christmas advised them to be tested.
So many potential victims of the dangerous health care violations at the HealthPlus Surgery Center phoned a Fort Lee law firm for potential help in lawsuits that the firm brought in extra staff. Another law firm, in Brooklyn, which plans to file additional suits Wednesday, held a press conference Monday with three former patients at the center.
“As soon as I got my letter I got a panic attack,” said Karine Travieso of Bergenfield, who is 41. She received a certified letter from the facility on Dec. 26 recommending she get blood tests for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
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“Getting a certified letter is not the way this should have gone down,” Travieso said, noting the nearly three-month lag between the time the facility was shut down for safety reasons and the patients were alerted. “The doctors who did the procedures should have been involved — and they just knew nothing.”
Some 3,778 patients underwent same-day procedures ranging from epidural injections for pain to shoulder surgery at the center between Jan. 1 and Sept. 7, when the state Department of Health, responding to a complaint, ordered an immediate halt to admissions.
The inspection found bloodstains on a stretcher, rust-like spots on surgical instruments, and a staff so rushed that trays containing surgical instruments were not allowed to dry thoroughly between uses. The center reopened three weeks later, after the state Health Department determined that corrective steps were adequate.
Preliminary results from the first 186 patients to be tested “show no acute infection in any of the patients,” Mark Manigan, an attorney representing HealthPlus, said in a post on the surgery center’s website.
One patient showed evidence of chronic hepatitis, which probably existed before he or she was treated at HealthPlus, Manigan said, but an analysis will be performed by the Health Department to be sure. Manigan has represented the ambulatory-surgery-center industry in New Jersey for many years.
One-time patients at the center who answered their doors in the days around Christmas, expecting the postal carrier was delivering a mail-order gift but instead receiving the alarming letters advising they be tested, are anxious and angry.
“How could they let all this time pass?” asked Kristin Debenedictis of Rochelle Park, who is 37. Her letter arrived on Dec. 21. “I cried. I was upset,” said the former waitress.
Debenedictis had two epidural injections during the critical time period at the facility to treat a herniated disc after a car accident. She had a blood test on Dec. 24, but still had not received the results on Monday.
Robert Stridiron, 52, a breaking-news photographer and emergency-services technician from Queens, said he had arthroscopic surgery on his right knee at the center on March 9. His certified letter arrived on Christmas Eve.
Stridiron went for a blood test on Dec. 27 and awaits the results.
“I’m very nervous. It’s very stressful. I’m scared about what could happen,” he said. “Being an EMT for 31 years, the first they teach you is sanitizing, wearing gloves, cleaning your instruments.” The doctor who performed the surgery at HealthPlus hasn’t called him back, he said.
Debenedictis and Stridiron spoke Monday at a press conference in Brooklyn with their lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein. “While it is horrible to contract HIV or hepatitis through no fault of your own, it is terrible as well to suffer the fear of contracting these diseases,” Rubenstein said. “Victims of both are entitled to damages.”
The delay in getting test results “exacerbates the horrors they suffer,” Rubenstein added. “The process of getting the results to these victims must be expedited.” None of his six clients have received their test results yet, he said.
A spokesman for LabCorp, Donald R. Von Hagen, said results for the full panel of tests typically are completed within four to five days after LabCorp receives the specimens. "Since the results will need to be communicated to the individual patient by HealthPlus or the patient’s physician, that could take additional time," he said.
Rubenstein said he plans to file individual lawsuits on behalf of his clients on Wednesday in New Jersey Superior Court in Hackensack.
Meanwhile, the Fort Lee attorney who filed the first lawsuit against HealthPlus on Friday said the list of clients for his class-action now has reached 30.
“One story is sadder than the other,” said the attorney, Michael Maggiano of Maggiano, DiGirolamo & Lizzi, describing patients who had canceled visits to sick relatives in Puerto Rico while waiting for test results. His clients come from the five boroughs of New York City, as well as Nanuet, Newark, Jersey City and Passaic and Bergen counties, he said.
HealthPlus said in a statement that it had corrected the lapses in infection control and dispensing of medication. Two employees were fired after the state inspection, and the facility’s nursing director resigned the day before the inspection, Manigan said.
But Maggiano said the level of contamination throughout the facility and the delay in notifying patients was very concerning. “There was a serious systemic failure that had to take place at the top of management over a nine-month period,” he said.
The Saddle Brook surgery center is licensed by the state and owned by Yan Moshe, a real estate multimillionaire, Manigan said.
Moshe, who also owns a surgery center in Hackensack that has been cited for failing to meet safety regulations, bought Meadowlands Hospital Medical Center in December 2017 despite having no experience running a hospital.
The Secaucus facility is now called Hudson Regional Hospital, and is where HealthPlus Surgery Center is referring patients to be tested.
For Karine Travieso, there was good news Monday afternoon. After being unable to obtain her blood test results from LabCorp, the company she was referred to by HealthPlus, she had additional tests done privately at NYU/Langone Medical Center.
All of the results came back negative for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
“The way this was handled is absurd,” she said. “People deserve to be treated better than this.”