A California nurse sustained “crushing injuries” after a freak accident left her pinned between an MRI machine and a bed.
Ainah Cervantes was left trapped after the device’s intense magnetic force pulled a hospital bed towards it, an investigation uncovered.
The nurse was with a patient at the Kaiser Permanente facility in Redwood City when the horrifying incident occurred in February.
The patient she was tending to fell from the bed and was uninjured, but Cervantes became pinned down between the front of the tube-shaped machine and the bed.
“I was getting pushed by the bed”, Cervantes told investigators with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) KTVU reports.
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“Basically, I was running backwards. If I didn’t run, the bed would smash me underneath,” she continued.
Cervantes sustained a severe laceration and was forced to undergo surgery that included the removal of two embedded screws, documents obtained by the station show.
A probe was only conducted several months after the accident and concluded the medical facility, “failed to provide radiologic services in a safe manner”.
The healthcare provider may now be slapped with a $18,000 fine over the workplace injury.
The report found several protocol breaches around the use of the machine, a diagnostic tool used to scan the body using magnetic fields and radio waves.
Other violations alleged in the report include MRI personnel were absent from the room at the time of the incident and the safety alarm failed to sound.
Investigators also said that the door to the room had been left open and the patient was not screened.
Employees did not have adequate safety training and the hospital failed to test its door alarm manually in a breach of Kaiser Permanent MRI safety rules, the report found.
“The many safety failures … created a culture of unsafe practices,” according to investigators.
Sheila Gilson, senior vice president for Kaiser Permanente San Mateo, told the KTVU the teams responded quickly and those involved “immediately received the care and support they needed”.
“This was a rare occurrence, but we are not satisfied until we understand why an accident occurs and implement changes to prevent it from occurring again,” Gilson added.
But KTVU reports the incident is not entirely without precedent.
Photos from an incident in 2015 in which nobody was harmed show a medical equipment cart stuck to an MRI scanner.
The medical outlet’s statement continued: “As an organization committed to continuous learning improvement, Kaiser Permanente fully investigated the incident and used what we learned to make specific operation changes to enhance safety.”
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