The hospital where I used to work has been stripped of its accreditation.
I was a Labor & Delivery nurse at King/Drew in the early 1990s. I don't know what it was like on the other units of the hospital, but I did see some stuff in L&D that was not kosher. Some things were just negligence on the part of one person, but others were systemic. One of the worst things I saw had to do with overmedicating patients to speed up labor.
Pitocin is a drug that is used to start labor or to speed up a labor. There are possible side effects, of course, including high blood pressure in the mother and decreased blood flow to the baby.
At King/Drew (back when I was there), the doctors would write orders for a standard dosage of Pitocin to be given to a laboring woman, but they would rely on the nurses to give stronger doses than what was written. So the label on the woman's IV bag would state that a certain amount of Pitocin had been added, but it would not be the true amount. Only the nurse knew how much Pit was really in there. And the patient was certainly not told that she was receiving a higher dose than the doctor had formally ordered.
The doctors knew which nurses would cooperate and give a patient some "hot Pit" and which ones would not. I had the experience of being excused from a particular patient's case because they knew that I wouldn't give anything but "legal Pit."
Here's more info on the use of Pitocin in labor.
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