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Report: VA Hospital Botched Cancer Treatments
Sunday, June 21, 2009
PHILADELPHIA — A newspaper says a common surgical procedure for the treatment of prostate cancer was botched at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Philadelphia 79 percent of the time.
The New York Times says a team that performed the procedure using radiation botched it on 92 of 116 occasions over more than six years. The paper says the team continued the treatment for a year even though the equipment that measured whether patients received the proper radiation dose was broken.
A federal commission announced last fall that an inspection at the hospital was under way partly because of the number of patients given incorrect radiation doses. The medical center suspended its prostate cancer treatment program as a result of the ongoing probe and the doctor chiefly responsible for the mistakes no longer works there.
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