WASHINGTON — A National Institutes of Health hospital announced Tuesday it is shaking up its leadership structure after an audit of the system found a need for more oversight to improve patient safety.
About a year ago, some contamination issues were discovered in the pharmacy unit of the NIH Clinical Center — a part of the hospital campus in Bethesda, Maryland, that makes drugs for clinical trials.
The findings led the unit to halt its operations and prompted NIH Director Francis Collins to examine practices at the Clinical Center — a hospital solely dedicated to clinical research — as well as NIH as a whole, Lena Sun, a Washington Post reporter who has been following the story, said on WTOP Tuesday.
The report was released last month, and while it found there’s no evidence patients were harmed, is eliciting changes at the top for NIH.
“An outside group of experts came back with a report that said there were sweeping reforms that needed to be put in place to protect patient safety, and that over the decades, clinical research had taken prominence over patient safety and they made a bunch of recommendations on how that could be fixed,” Sun said.
Among the changes, is the decision to structure the hospital similar to other hospitals — with a chief executive surrounded by a team of people with experience in oversight and patient safety.
“This individual will be ultimately responsible for oversight of all facilities and will report quarterly to the new Hospital Board, providing metrics about hospital performance and regulatory compliance,” a NIH spokesperson said in an email to WTOP.
The restructuring was announced to the employees Tuesday, and represents the most significant restructuring the clinical center has seen.
In a statement, NIH says it’s starting a nationwide search for a CEO with experience in medicine, management and oversight with a goal to have the position filled by the end of the year, Sun said.
WTOP’s Megan Cloherty contributed to this report from Washington.
