U. of Chicago Hospitals Found to Overcrowd Children’s Wards

A state court in Illinois has ruled that two hospitals in Chicago continued to overcrowd bassinets in a unit for sick infants two years after being warned about the practice, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The rulings came in a lawsuit charging that Comer Children’s Hospital and Wyler’s University of Chicago Children’s Hospital double-bunked the infants in order to receive double the amount of Medicaid money per bed space, collecting $5.7-million in federal money from 1997 to 2003. The court also found that infants became sick because of the overcrowding.

The court’s ruling means that the lawsuit can proceed, even though the hospitals had tried to stop it.

The hospitals have stated that by federal law, they must not refuse to treat patients, and that because of the number of critically ill infants, the bassinets were placed closer than they should have been. The hospitals deny that the infants sickened each other.

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