RICHMOND, Va. — When choosing a daycare for your child or a nursing home for a loved one in Virginia, you can look up federal and state inspection results online. The same is not true when choosing a hospital.
In Virginia, the Department of Health is required by law to inspect hospitals every two years. Those findings are not published online, but the public can obtain them through public records requests.
In September, we learned through a public records request that those inspections had not happened in years at Richmond-area hospitals.
When we asked the then-Chief Operating Officer for the Virginia Department of Health, Christopher Lindsay, about the lack of inspections, he pointed to other forms of hospital oversight.
"I do want to add that 99% of Virginia hospitals have been appropriately surveyed by CMS, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, designated bodies such as the Joint Commission or others," he said.
For hospitals to qualify for Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, CMS must accredit them to show they meet federal standards. Typically, CMS contracts with national accrediting organizations like the Joint Commission — the nation's largest accreditor.
But the public cannot see the Joint Commission's inspection results.
"The Joint Commission inspects hospitals for Medicare, but the public cannot ever find out about any problems that they might have identified," said Lisa McGiffert of the Patient Safety Action Network.
McGiffert said that lack of transparency is a problem.
"The public doesn't really have a lot of power in this system. But if information is made public, then we can at least look at it and see what the results of inspections and problems that were found and corrected and make our own decisions," McGiffert said.
CBS 6 investigative reporter Melissa Hipolit looked up Henrico Doctors Hospital on the Joint Commission's website — a hospital where a nurse was recently convicted of breaking nine premature babies' bones between 2022 and 2024, and where a MRSA outbreak persisted in the NICU for 3 years.
Child Protective Services documentation exclusively obtained by CBS 6 shows a hospital lawyer told CPS the hospital contacted the Joint Commission in September 2023 to report four NICU babies with fractures.
But there is nothing detailing those injuries — or the MRSA outbreak — on the Joint Commission's website. Henrico Doctors was accredited on May 3, 2025.
When we asked the Joint Commission about this, a spokesperson said: "To protect patient privacy and allow for full investigations, any event reporting by a facility to The Joint Commission and subsequent activity is confidential."
CMS proposed a rule in 2017 requiring private accreditors to publicly detail problems found during inspections, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the proposal met "swift backlash from the Commission, hospitals and other organizations." CMS withdrew the proposal six months later.
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That same year, a Wall Street Journal investigation found the Joint Commission "rarely withdraws its approval in the face of serious safety violations."
McGiffert said the fact that the governing body of the Joint Commission is made up mostly of health care professionals creates a conflict of interest.
"If you had a governing body made up of the public or regular people, they would definitely think that these surveys should be public. But when the healthcare industry is a major part of overseeing their oversight, then it creates a conflict," McGiffert said.
The Joint Commission declined an interview but sent a statement reading in part:
"Joint Commission enables and affirms the highest standards of healthcare quality and patient safety for all. Our accreditation is an objective evaluation process that helps healthcare organizations measure, assess and continuously improve performance to deliver safe, high-quality care for their patients. Specific information related to survey activity is kept confidential to encourage candor in the process and protect patient privacy."
Congress gave CMS authority to publicly post hospice survey results in 2021. We emailed various members of Congress representing Central Virginia to find out if they want these hospital surveys made public. The only response we received was from Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va), whose office said he is committed to transparency in health care and is looking into this issue.
Watch Melissa Hipolit's reporting on CBS 6 News and WTVR.com. Have something for Melissa to investigate? Email her.
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