Kaiser will pay up to $49 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the state Department of Justice and prosecutors in six counties, including San Bernardino, that accused California’s largest health care provider of disposing of syringes, medicine, bodily fluids and potentially body parts in dumpsters bound for local landfills.
Among the waste, investigators found more than 10,000 pages of medical records for 7,700 patients during those inspections, according to state Attorney General Rob Bonta. Prosecutors suspect millions of Californians’ personal information may have ended up in the trash across the state.
Kaiser, under state and federal laws, should have shredded that information and sent the medical waste to licensed facilities for disposal.
‘Serious’ health risk
“The items found posed a serious risk to anyone that may have come into contact with them, from health care providers and patients in the same room as the trash cans, to custodians and sanitation workers who directly handled the waste, to workers at the landfill,” Bonta said during a press conference.
“Nurses, physicians and patients could inadvertently touch blood or bodily fluids containing dangerous pathogens. Custodians and sanitation workers could be stuck by a used needle. An aerosol can that wasn’t fully empty could explode and start a fire in a trash can, or in the back of a garbage truck making its way through neighborhood streets.”
Though Bonta said the waste included body parts, Kaiser Permanente said in a statement that it was not “aware of any body parts being found at any time during this investigation.”
The health care provider learned of improper disposals about six years ago and took immediate action, according to the statement.
“We immediately completed an extensive auditing effort of the waste stream at our facilities and established mandatory and ongoing training to address the findings,” the statement said. “We take this matter extremely seriously…
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