A Minnesota hospital apologized Wednesday after the remains of a stillborn baby boy wrapped in linens were mistaken for dirty laundry and delivered to a cleaning service.

Regions Hospital officials said they were notifying the stillborn infant’s family to apologize and providing counseling to employees at the laundromat where the baby was found Tuesday.

“This is a terrible mistake, and we are deeply sorry,” Chris Boese, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said in a statement. “We have processes in place that should have prevented this but did not. We are working to identify the gap in our system, and to make sure this does not happen again.”

The baby’s body was discovered Tuesday afternoon when it tumbled out of a bed sheet at Crothall Laundry in Red Wing, Minn., according to Red Wing Police Chief Roger Pohlman.

The infant had a tag on his ankle and was wearing a diaper, according to Pohlman.

Pohlman said workers at the laundry service called Regions Hospital, which promptly dispatched officials to retrieve the infant’s remains. Police then arrived at the scene to interview the laundromat’s shaken employees.

The infant had been in the hospital’s morgue before being accidentally transferred to the laundry service, Boese told reporters at a Wednesday morning press conference. Hospital officials do not yet know why or how the infant’s remains were transported, but Pohlman said police had no indication of foul play.

“We are talking to all involved staff that might have been involved in any of this,” Boese said.

The baby had been delivered stillborn on April 4 at 22 weeks in gestational development, Pohlman said. Boese could not confirm the date of delivery at Wednesday's press conference.

The Ramsey County Medical Examiner's office willl examine the baby's remains, according to Pohlman.

LOS ANGELES -- Five heart patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center contracted staph infections after a doctor operated on them with bacteria on his hands, the hospital said this week.

The doctor, whom the hospital declined to name, had an inflammation on his hand when he implanted replacement heart valves into five patients last June.

He wore gloves, but they developed microscopic tears, the hospital said, causing the infection to pass to patients.

All five became infected with the staphylococcus epidermidis bacteria, the hospital said.

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“We have apologized to the patients involved, worked diligently to answer any questions they have, and provided appropriate follow-up, support and monitoring,” a spokesman for the hospital said in a statement Sunday.

The physician involved remains on the hospital’s medical staff, but is no longer performing surgeries, the hospital said.

Tina Fineberg / AP

A patient is taken to a waiting medical transport vehicle outside Bellevue Hospital in New York on Wednesday.

Bellevue Hospital, New York City’s flagship public hospital, started evacuating about 500 patients who had stuck it out during Sandy’s winds and flooding on Wednesday. The hospital has been on generator power since the storm knocked out power to much of the city of Monday, and it had already transferred patients on ventilators to other hospitals.

The New York Times said people were carrying babies down staircases on Tuesday and described intermittent lights and a smell of fuel permeating the facility. Other hospitals were taking the patients from the hospital, on New York’s East Side.

New York University’s Langone Medical Center had already distributed 300 of its patients to other hospitals amid the chaos caused by the storm.

More on the storm: 

Alzheimer's patient refused to evacuate

Courtesy the Grice Family via Cr

Kim Grice, shown before and after her face caught on fire during surgery Tuesday to remove cysts in her head.

It was supposed to be a routine outpatient surgery to remove some growths from Kim Grice’s head. But something went horribly wrong during the Tuesday morning procedure and a flash fire seared Grice’s face and neck.

The 29-year-old mother of three was rushed by helicopter to the University of South Alabama Burn Unit with burns to her face and neck.

Grice’s mom, who had been waiting in the lobby of the North Okaloosa Medical Center in Crestview, Fla., knew something bad had happened. 

“At 8 a.m. two patients were back there,” Ann Grice told the Crestview (Fla.) News Bulletin. “One was my daughter. At 10:20 emergency medical and the fire department pulled up and there was a fifty-fifty chance that they were coming through the doors for my daughter. I went to the desk and no one would tell me what was wrong.”

When hospital personnel finally explained that Kim’s face had caught fire, Ann was stunned.

“I am in shock,” she told the Bulletin. “This is not what happens with a routine outpatient surgery. She had headaches and the doctor was going to remove three cysts and biopsy them. But something went bad wrong and my daughter is now in a burn unit with burn specialists and I still don’t know what happened. No one will tell me why or how this happened to her.”

What happened to Kim Grice was not an isolated incident. Experts estimate that each year 650 fires flare up in operating rooms around the country. Some patients recover with scars and emotional damage. Some die from burns and smoke inhalation.

Surgeons and other hospital staff are often as surprised as patients when a fire sparks in the OR.

North Okaloosa Medical Center issued a statement with an update on Kim Grice’s condition, promising a full investigation of the fire.

“The hospital deeply regrets today’s event in which a patient sustained burns during a procedure in our ambulatory surgery center,” the statement read. “The staff took immediate steps to respond, including moving the patient to the hospital’s emergency department. The patient was fully alert and able to converse with the ED staff during the examination and initial treatment. She was stabilized and then transferred to the University of South Alabama Medical Center for further care.

Experts say it shouldn’t be a surprise when fires flash in ORs. All the necessary ingredients are on hand to spark a conflagration.

These days more and more operations use electro-cautery devices and lasers. Those devices are what Dr. David Cowles calls the “trifecta” of elements – oxygen, alcohol prep and an ignition source - that lead to flash fires in the OR.

Story: Operating room fires hurt hundreds a year

“There’s a basic simple chemistry and physics principle that when three elements are combined then a fire occurs,” Cowles told NBC’s Dr. Nancy Snyderman in a recent interview. “Likewise, if you remove any one of those elements it makes it impossible for a fire to occur.

The FDA launched a new initiative to prevent surgical fires, noting that though these are rare events, they are also highly preventable. The agency convened a special workshop to look for ways to stop fires from ever happening and to give medical personnel the tools and knowledge needed to deal with a fire if one occurs.

Until more hospitals learn about the danger of fire in the OR, each year there will be more patients like Kim Grice.

"I am so ready to see my babies," she told the Crestview Bulletin in a telephone interview Thursday from the South Alabama Medical Center's burn unit. "But I don't want them to see me this way.”