The main objective of any hospital is obviously to do everything in its power to heal and cure the sick. But in recent years, hospitals are finding out that they also need to avoid actually causing harm to patients, by minimizing the mistakes in medication and treatment, preventing contagion and containing infections in the treatment wards and in operating rooms. Beilinson has utterly failed at this extremely important test. This mistake (failing to properly sanitize an endoscope used on an HIV-positive patient) is extremely serious, and should never have happened at one of the largest and most central hospitals in Israel the leading hospital of Clalit Health Services, Israel's largest healthcare provider, which serves most of the country's citizens. The Health Ministry's regulations carefully detail disinfecting, sterilizing and cleaning procedures for equipment used to examine body cavities and organs. This is because the instruments involved "have the potential for passing infections between patients and to hospital staff." Many contagious and serious illnesses can be transferred this way, some of them incurable diseases that require lifelong treatment, and could even cause a person's death. The Health Ministry had also made this clear, mentioning in its instructions that "maintaining these standards of disinfection and sterilization of instruments and their apparatuses would prevent the transference of infectious diseases." Beilinson refused to divulge at what stage of the disinfecting process the oversight had happened, but we do know that the endoscopic equipment was not properly cleaned and sterilized for around 36 hours, during which some 150 patients were examined! This means that 150 times, this machine was not cleaned in accordance to the Health Ministry's full and complete instructions. It is also important to note that Beilinson's administration reported the incident of it own accord, telling both the public and the Health Ministry. This is not standard practice at a number of hospitals in the country, which go to great lengths to conceal such information from the public and even the Health Ministry. Yet precisely for this reason, the Health Ministry must enforce stricter inspection and supervision on the disinfecting process at medical equipment throughout the country, since until now the office's supervision has been very lax, and has failed to provide patients with the protection they need.
