The Consumers Union — the policy and mobilization division of Consumer Reports — found that 131 hospitals in California, including Berkeley’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, did not have state inspections for five years prior to 2015.

Consumers Union recently petitioned the California Department of Public Health, or CDPH, to better protect patients from hospital infection based off of their analysis of hospital infection and inspection rates. The analysis highlights a severe backlog of CDPH hospital inspections — a process required by California law to occur every three years, according to Consumers Union Campaign Director Lisa McGiffert.

“We think there should be fluid information between these departments to improve the safety of these hospitals,” McGiffert said. “Inspections are just not being enforced. It’s really not the hospital’s fault that they haven’t been inspected.”

Both the Oakland and Berkeley Alta Bates campuses underwent full onsite licensing surveys — a CDPH inspection — in 2016, after the Consumers Union analysis timeframe, according to Sutter Health Bay Area spokesperson Clayton Warren.

The petition also calls on two sectors of CDPH — the Healthcare-Associated Infections Program, or HAI, and the inspectors themselves — to better share hospitals’ track records on infection. Currently, CDPH does not require HAI infection control to divulge a hospital’s rate of infection to inspectors, who have the authority to enforce regulations through fines and other measures.

Consumers Union wants to eliminate the firewall between these two branches of CDPH so that state inspectors can “prioritize inspections of the worst performing hospitals if they haven’t been reviewed in the past three years, and to use its enforcement authority to require hospitals to improve infection control,” according to the petition.

Consumers Union filed a Public Records Request seeking information about hospital inspections conducted by the CDPH. They then analyzed hospitals that had a significantly higher standardized infection ratio in at least one of five healthcare-associated infection types in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Alta Bates, a Sutter Health hospital set to close its Berkeley location within the next 14 years, reported only one instance of surgical site infections over the three-year span.

The CDPH reported that 19,847 patient infections occurred in California hospitals in 2015, but not all infections are reported — CDPH has previously estimated that 72,000 to 87,000 hospital patients get infected every year, according to a Consumers Union press release.

State inspectors are privy to medication errors, medical errors and complaints that have been filed about a hospital prior to a scheduled inspection but not infection information, according to McGiffert.

Jackie Dragon, a labor representative for Alta Bates hospital, suspects that the backlog is primarily due to state budget cuts resulting in short staffing.

“From our perspective, the safety of patient care can only be guaranteed when there is adequate funding for public agencies that can carry out inspections,” Dragon said.

Contact Audrey McNamara at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @McNamaraAud.