This story was featured in the Sunday edition of the Ventura County Star.
The VC Star reports on the impact of off site monitoring at hospitals in Oxnard and Camarillo. Union nurses and Monitor Technicians who work at St. John's Regional Medical Center sounded the alarm about the patient safety hazards of patient heart rhythm monitored by technicians 430 miles away at a site in Phoenix, Arizona.
The story includes quotes from Nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center:
“Just a few seconds or a few minutes can be the difference between life and death,” said Joshua Sharp, a telemetry nurse at St. John’s in Oxnard."
"Once you get over 40 patients, the chance of error goes up," said Sharp, the telemetry nurse."
“We’ve already experienced delays of 2 minutes and even miscommunication of up to 40 minutes,” said Christian Luna, telemetry nurse at St. John’s in Oxnard. “When it comes to the oxygenation of the human body, seconds are life.”
Telemetry nurse Kateryna Manu told the Oxnard City Council the remote system mistakenly stopped monitoring a patient who was still in the hospital and still at risk of heart attack problems. It meant there was no monitoring for 2 hours, 10 minutes, she said.