After a nurse broke babies' bones, Henrico hospital's inspection results stayed hidden from public view

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.

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.

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