ROCKPORT — Nearly a year after its license to operate was put on conditional status, Penobscot Bay Medical Center is back in the pink, say state regulators.
Pen Bay was operating under a fully restored license as of Wednesday.
The hospital came under the scrutiny of the state Department of Human Services last summer after complaints about its emergency department.
The death of an elderly woman shortly after being treated in the hospital’s emergency room and then released raised questions about the care offered at Pen Bay.
Those questions were asked with more urgency when a car-accident victim was treated, released and told to return if she experienced certain symptoms. The woman returned and was found to have serious injuries and had to be sent to Maine Medical Center in Portland for surgery.
The DHS began to investigate the emergency room but extended its review to the entire hospital, said Sandra Bethanis, assistant director of the licensing and certification division. She said federal law covering how patients are screened and transferred triggered the fuller inquiry. Within 45 days of the initial complaints, the hospital was in compliance with federal law, Bethanis said.
Problems in the emergency room were more serious, though.
“We generally put hospitals on conditional license when we think systems are broken,” she said. A physician and two nurses working for the state visited the hospital three, five and eight months after the initial complaints. This week, a state team of two physicians, three nurses, a pharmacist and a sanitarian conducted a final review and gave the hospital a clean bill of health.
Last fall, Roy Hitchings came on board at Northeast Health, the hospital’s parent corporation, as president. In a news release, Hitchings said state regulators “looked in almost every nook and cranny of the hospital and had a lot of praise for what they saw.”
One result of the inquiry is that a physician was referred to the state Board of Medicine for review, Bethanis said. Randall Manning, the board’s director, would not comment on the referral except to say there was an investigation under way.
The hospital has a new emergency room director, and two physicians and a nurse practitioner have been hired to help reduce patient waiting time, according to the news release.
Bethanis said Pen Bay officials were cooperative with the review and devoted a significant amount of resources to assist DHS.
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