Community Health Services on Albany Avenue in Hartford. (Patrick Raycraft / The Hartford Courant)
HARTFORD, CT – Community Health Services, a clinic on Albany Avenue that serves some of the city's neediest patients, has been fined $24,750 by federal workplace regulators for substandard infection-control practices involving bloodborne pathogens, records show.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Hartford office last month issued four citations – for two "serious" violations and two "repeat" violations. The clinic was ordered to correct the problems by last Tuesday, records show. Warren Simpson, director of the Hartford office, said Friday that he was awaiting confirmation that the clinic has complied.
Community Health Services, one of the city's oldest and busiest clinics, was fined $9,945 by OSHA for similar violations last year.
The state Department of Public Health in November had placed the clinic's license on probation for one year and fined the clinic $2,500 for other infection-control problems that DPH had noted in inspections. Then, last spring, DPH notified the clinic that it had conducted another inspection and found additional violations – namely that clinical staff had failed to assure that some vaccines were stored properly and that staff members had failed to weigh all nine of the patients whose medical charts the DPH inspectors had reviewed.