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As a psychology major, the one concept I have been bombarded with constantly is that statistics, while they can indeed be informative and helpful, can also be misleading. In fact, statistics are often a tool used to manipulate people.
When reading this week’s cover story, ‘Newsday Was Wrong, SBUMC Defends,’ I was intrigued how SBUMC’s defense of their pediatric cardiology program was one firmly rooted in statistics. They cited the average death rates for other comparable hospitals and emphasized how Stony Brook’s rates of patient mortality are below average.
However, what is inherently wrong about this defense is that the issue here is not necessarily how many patients died, but in the manner in which they did. To use an analogy: Say in a certain poverty-level neighborhood, over the course of one month, three people were fatally shot in robberies. In another neighborhood, home to a senior citizen assisted living community, eight people pass away from natural causes over the course of the same month. The mortality rate of residents is significantly higher in the second neighborhood, but one would hardly be able to argue that the first neighborhood is safer purely because less people died. That is, it is not the number of deaths, but the manner in which they occurred.
In 2002, Stony Brook University Hospital was fined $54,000 by the state of New York when a six day old infant was administered ten times the prescribed dose of potassium chloride following heart surgery and subsequently died. (http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-libaby234753295may23,0,2215646.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines).
Dr. Irvin Krukenkamp, who successfully sued the university hospital for over three million dollars, pointed out that the pediatric cardiac surgeon was only at the University hospital once a week. He also pointed out that the hospital was extremely indignant whenever their activities were questioned. It is difficult to believe that his case was unfounded, as he was paid such a large sum of money. It was a poorly run pediatric cardiac surgery unit that was to blame for these infants’ deaths. Landscapers should be on contract, not pediatric heart surgeons.
In short, while Stony Brook may indeed have a lower mortality rate than other comparable hospitals, this is hardly the entire story. Infants died because of mistakes on the part of Hospital staff (another young infant nearly died in 1995 from an overdose of morphine), mistakes which could have-and should have-been prevented, and from an overall lax and shoddy structure of crucial medical departments.
President Kenny and Dr. Green and Dr. Fine can throw around all the statistics they would like to, but it seems that both the state and the federal government were concerned enough to launch investigations- and they are unlikely to be deterred by a few numbers.
