A flawed system at the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, which meant that hundreds of women were not informed of the results of their cancer screening tests has resulted in the firing of its executive director just a week after the slip up was discovered.
The dismissal of Joseph Orlando, 58, the director for a decade of the city-run hospital, is say city officials an attempt to restore the public's faith in Jacobi.
Alan Aviles, the acting director of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which oversees Jacobi, says he hopes that the swift and decisive action to correct the inexcusable failure will help the center to begin to regain patients' trust. He says patients their safety and well-being must be the highest priority.
A hospital spokeswoman said Mr. Orlando was not available for comment. Corporation officials say they have exercised their right to terminate Mr. Orlando "without cause", as his contract stipulated.
Orlando's position will be temporarily taken over by William P. Walsh, who is the corporation's senior vice president of the Southern Brooklyn and Staten Island Health Network.
The action follows the announcement earlier this week that 307 women were not informed about abnormal results on Pap smear tests, a routine but important screening test for cervical cancer. Women who have abnormal results are advised to have more extensive testing to be sure they do not have cancer, but in this case, some women were not told of their results for more than a year.
Since the discovery of the mistake, all but one of the women have been notified, and hospital officials said that so far none had tested positive for cancer.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said the mistake was unacceptable, and felt that people's lives were being played with, he raises the question of how adequate the chain of supervision was.