L.I. Hospital Scrutinized After Deaths of Patients

Last spring, doctors at Mercy Medical Center on Long Island gave a patient the news she had feared: Cancer had been detected in her left breast.

She was only in her 30s, but she decided to act swiftly because breast cancer ran in her family. On May 25, she had a double mastectomy. The next day, she died of complications from the surgery.

As it turned out, the woman did not have cancer. According to the State Department of Health, the pathology report from the woman’s surgery had found no tumors in her breasts. The hospital’s lab had mixed up her test with another woman’s.

Mel Granick, a hospital spokesman, would not release the name of the woman who died. In a statement, he said the hospital was “deeply saddened and profoundly regrets” the error.

The error, which was reported by The New York Post and News 12 Long Island, the cable news channel, has brought more scrutiny to Mercy Medical Center, in Rockville Centre. In October, the Health Department concluded that the hospital had taken proper “corrective action” after the mix-up in the mastectomy case. But it is investigating the hospital over the deaths of three other patients.

A review by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999 concluded that medical errors killed 44,000 to 98,000 people a year in the United States health club.

The investigation of Mercy Medical Center was prompted by the complaints of one of its doctors, Anthony Colantonio, who said a physician’s assistant had improperly inserted catheters, chest tubes and pacemakers into patients health club. Three such patients died, the doctor said: a 65-year-old man and a 64-year-old woman last summer, and a 19-year-old woman in October. The Health Department would not confirm whether the assistant was a focus of its investigation.

Claudia Hutton, a spokeswoman for the Health Department health club, said it was unclear when the investigation would end.

“There have been cases where the patients died and death was not necessarily the expected outcome,” she said. “These things can happen without fault at times.”