Peninsula Hospital’s lab permit suspended

Peninsula Hospital Center is currently operating under an order from the State Department of Health that the Far Rockaway facility cannot admit patients for 30 days from Feb. 23, when the order was issued, and the permit for its clinical laboratory was suspended.

Health Commissioner Nirav R. Shah issued the directive after the 173-bed hospital failed an inspection of its laboratory. The laboratory was cited for numerous violations, including a lack of training, competency assessment and continuing education for its personnel, no standard operating procedure for when and what quality control materials should be performed on the blood gas analyzers, and three units of expired plasma were found in the Blood Bank freezer.

“The department’s Wadsworth Center Clinical Laboratory Evaluation Program inspected the clinical laboratory at the Peninsula Hospital Center on February 21 and 22, and found serious deficiencies in the administration and operation relating to the clinical laboratory operation,” Dr. Guangui Kong, wrote in the order.

Patients that were required to be transferred were taken to other hospitals and some were discharged, according to Liz Sulik, the hospital’s spokeswoman. "The hospital is continuing to seek a solution to its clinical laboratory services and hopes to have a permanent resolution satisfactory to the New York State Department of Health very quickly," Sulik said.

Peninsula’s laboratory was previously inspected from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 in 2010, said Michael Moran, a State Department of Health spokesman. A follow up inspection was scheduled for July 12 of last year, but wasn’t conducted after the laboratory manager informed the inspector that the hospital was closing, he said.

“There were problems noted during the previous inspection that were also observed during the most recent inspection; however additional problems were observed,” Moran said.