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Alta Bates Summit Medical Center

The California Department of Public Health began investigating an Oakland hospital Monday after a patient died over the weekend. The woman had been under the care of a nurse who was hired to replace workers during a labor dispute.

“The California Department of Public Health has launched an investigation at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center regarding a patient death on Saturday,” said Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the health department. “Because the investigation is ongoing, we cannot provide additional details at this time.” 

The patient, Judith Ming, 66, was an Oakland woman who suffered from ovarian cancer, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. She had been hospitalized since July, according to the Oakland Police Department. 

On Monday afternoon, the hospital confirmed that state investigators were on site. The Oakland Police Department and Alameda County Coroner's office are also investigating the patient's death.

The hospital could face a $50,000 penalty from the state, pending the results of the investigation. Since 2008, the state has fined Alta Bates Summit Medical Center six times for failing to report incidents such as medication errors on time. In 2009, the hospital paid a $25,000 penalty to the state for jeopardizing a patient's health. 

Ming died around 1 a.m. Saturday, and the hospital reported the incident to the state later that morning, officials said. The Oakland Police Department went to the hospital to investigate the death at 4 a.m. Saturday morning,  the Bay City News Service reported. In a statement, the police said that the patient had been given "a non-prescribed dosage of a medication that is known to be lethal in the manner in which it was administered to the patient."

Hospital officials refused to comment on the details of the patient's death citing the ongoing investigations. But the Oakland Tribune, citing another replacement nurse who was fired after she complained about the conditions at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, reported that Ming may have died when she was given a dietary supplement intravenously instead of through a feeding tube.

The Chronicle, citing a source close to the investigation, reported the supplement was supposed to be delivered through a catheter in the patient's stomach, not through an IV that delivered medicine directly into her bloodstream.

The death occurred in the midst of a labor dispute. Some 23,000 registered nurses in Northern and Central California went on strike Thursday to protest cuts to health care and benefits for nurses and other hospital workers. Hospitals run by Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente, as well as Children's Hospital Oakland, were among the 34 hospitals in the region where many nurses walked off the job for one day, as The Bay Citizen reported.

While the strike is over, the hospital had told nurses not to come back to work until Tuesday, since it had hired replacements on a five-day contract. Some 60 percent of the unionized nurses at the hospital had participated in the strike, according to hospital officials.

Martha Kuhl, a nurse at Children’s Hospital Oakland, who is on the board of directors of the California Nurses Association, said, “There were nurses who worked in that unit who tried to return to work that day and were turned away by the employer.”

The hospital insists that the fact that the nurse who administered the lethal dose was a replacement worker had nothing to do with the incident.

“This is a tragic error. It could have occurred at any time,” said Dr. Steve O’Brien, vice president of medical affairs for Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, who said that he’d spoken with the patient’s grieving family, and "they are devastated.”

O'Brien described the mood at the hospital as "somber." He said, “I have never seen in my 17 years a case like this."

As for the nurse who made the error, Obrien said, “To any health care workers involved in an event like this, it's too tragic to continue to provide health care, so she is no longer working here."