A Tennessee family was left furious after a loved one’s death certificate listed COVID-19 as the cause of death despite the patient having tested negative for the virus on three separate occasions leading up to his death.
“Oh, it was a slap in the face,” said Deborah Hughey after losing her father, Hal Short. “I felt like it was a slap in the face to our family, a couple of days before my dad died, we knew he was dying, me and my mom had a conversation that he had these COVID tests, and they were all negative, and at that point she said, ‘If I get his death certificate and it says COVID-19 was his cause of death I’m going to be furious.'”
“We weren’t in the COVID unit, never even suggested, on the last day, the day that he dies all of us got to go in there without a mask, and other members of extended family, got to say goodbye,” said Dean Short, Hal Short’s wife.
The family says medical records show Short had tested negative for the virus three times, which was important to them because it allowed him to stay out of the COVID unit and allowed the family to visit him and have physical contact in the days leading up to his death. But when the death certificate came back, COVID-19 PNEUMONIA was listed as the cause of death.
“And when she brought it to me, she said, ‘You’re not going to like this.’ I said, ‘Oh no,’ and I took it out of the package. The first thing I looked at was cause of death: COVID-19.”
Short had a number of health issues, including a bad heart, failing kidneys, and was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma in late August. Despite a heavy dose of chemotherapy, Short died less than a month after his cancer diagnosis. The family searched his medical records and found no mention of COVID-19, and said it didn’t sit well with them that the cause of death listed was COVID-19 when he had never tested positive for the disease.
FOX 17 News reached TriStar Centennial Medical Center in Nashville for comment, which apologized to the family after finding a “clerical error” had caused the mistake.
“We found a clerical error in one note stating that Mr. Short had COVID-19 which was resourced in completing the death certificate. The physician who completed the death certificate has already submitted his amendment to reflect the correct diagnoses and remove COVID-19 from the list. We sincerely apologize for any confusion this has caused,” the hospital said.
The family said they are happy that the hospital apologized and fixed the death certificate, but they remain confused about how one note in Short’s file could have led to ignoring three negative tests and the hospital’s own preliminary cause of death report that listed septic shock and acute respiratory failure as the cause of death.
“That’s not good enough, no that’s really not good enough, just saying we made a mistake and me just forget about it,” said Dean Short. “How many other people are you making this mistake with? He was honest about everything. If he knew this had happened, it would break his heart.”
FOX 17 reached out to TriStar Centennial again for clarification on how the error could have occurred.
“All I can tell you is it was a clerical error, we corrected it and we are sorry,” the hospital responded.
