Louisiana woman’s death highlights weak hospital oversight after Steward collapse

WEST MONROE, La. ( Louisiana Illuminator ) - The monitor that had been tracking Mearl Hodge’s heartbeat started to show an abnormal rhythm. A technician at Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, alerted nurses that the electrodes that should have been affixed to Hodge’s chest seemed to have popped loose. No one checked. It was a granddaughter, arriving for a visit 20 minutes later, who discovered that her grandmother no longer had a pulse.

The circumstance of Hodge’s death is among more than 650 documented instances of deficient care at nearly three dozen hospitals across eight states that were owned by Steward Health Care before the entire system collapsed last year in a spectacular bankruptcy.

Hodge’s death, four days after she was admitted to Glenwood with COVID