Tracking hospitals that mistreat babies

Investigative journalists at two major newspapers analyzed birth records to expose how hospitals inadequately care for sick and premature newborns, with Ohio hospitals keeping high-risk babies they weren't equipped to treat and New York public hospitals showing significantly higher death and injury rates compared to private hospitals.

Reporters at two major newspapers recently analyzed birth records to probe how hospitals mistreat newborn infants.

In their December series "Babies at Risk," Cleveland Plain Dealer reporters Dave Davis and Joan Mazzolini used birth records to show that three-quarters of Ohio's 127 community hospitals have been trying to care for sick and extremely premature babies they weren't qualified to treat.

According to regulators, such babies should be transferred to one of the state's 13 highly sophisticated regional medical centers. This was often not happening. According to critics, the blame falls largely on a system where hospitals compete too aggressively for patients.

Shortly after the series ran, Ohio's top health official called on lawmakers to give him more power to prevent such practices in the future.

The New York Times' Dean Baquet and Jane Fritsch, in "Mismanaged Care: how public hospitals fail," compared the city's public and private hospitals when it comes to delivering babies.

A computer analysis of 1993 city and state birth records produced some dramatic numbers. For babies weighing more than 5.5 pounds - the cutoff doctors use as an indication of good health - the death rate for babies born at the public hospitals was 80 percent more than the rate at the private hospitals. Public hospitals also had higher rates of serious birth injuries. The differences remained significant even after Baquet and Fritsch took into account the differences in the health of mothers at the various hospitals.