State health officials yesterday released their long-awaited report on quality complaints at Catskill Regional Medical Center.

The state Department of Health investigated nine complaints filed by Crystal Run Healthcare and found violations of state code in four of them. The other five were unsubstantiated.

The violations included a serious matter of a doctor needing to perform a Caesarean section on a woman under local anesthesia because the anesthesiologist did not get to the hospital in time.

In another case, the DOH found that it took about 24 hours for a patient admitted with chest pains to see a cardiologist. And a woman in labor who was in serious pain had to wait two hours to receive an epidural, the state found.

The report also cited improper orders on patient medication.

DOH spokesman Jeffrey Hammond said the findings were significant; the agency doesn’t issue these reports lightly. But had the DOH felt patient safety was in serious jeopardy at Catskill Regional, it would have stepped in immediately instead of spending months on a report, Hammond said.

Catskill officials said they’ve already begun to fix the problems, and they’ll file a corrective action plan next week.

“There were no surprises,” said acting CEO Lawrence Cafasso. “We knew all this and we corrected what we had to. The important thing is that patient outcomes were successful.”

But Crystal Run managing partner Dr. Hal Teitelbaum, who pulled dozens of his doctors out of Catskill Regional June 1 over quality issues, said the findings were serious and corroborated all of Crystal Run’s complaints.

“Hospitals are not supposed to make mistakes,” he said.

Still, Teitelbaum said he hoped the report, and Catskill’s response, would signal the start of a new chapter for the hospital. And he said he hoped his giant doctors’ group could return there soon.

Cafasso agreed, and said it’s time to start putting this crisis in the past.

“We really want to move forward,” he said.

ROL