 |
| See articles written by Martine Ehrenclou HERE.
Hospitals across Canada are voluntarily adopting a surgery checklist in a move aimed at avoiding the kind of errors that led to two unnecessary mastectomies in Windsor, Ont. Starting April 1, the Ontario government will require that hospitals use and comply with a surgical checklist. Some hospitals across Canada have also elected to adopt a similar checklist.
Let's face it. Medical care has become a whole lot more complex. The scientific knowledge base and practice of medicine has expanded exponentially as scientists have plumbed the human body and mind to reveal its genetic, molecular, anatomic, physiological and psychological mysteries and developed ever-more sophisticated means to diagnose disease, treat patients and prolong life. Although this acceleration in progress holds great benefits for an individual's health, it poses a daunting challenge to physicians trying to keep up with the latest findings and developments. Who can provide state of the art care and deliver complex treatments to numerous patients day after day without error? No one. It is simply not humanly possible to be error free.
In response, the AMA is telling its members what they can do about the lower payments, including closing their doors to new Medicare patients, CNN reports. “To our physicians, we are providing information on their Medicare participation options, including how to remove themselves from the Medicare program,” AMA President James Rohack told the cable channel. A minor-league pitcher in his younger days, Richard Armbruster kept playing baseball recreationally into his 70s, until his right hip started bothering him. Last February he went to a St. Louis hospital for what was to be a routine hip replacement. By late March, Mr. Armbruster, then 78, was dead. After a series of postsurgical complications, the final blow was a bloodstream infection that sent him into shock and resisted treatment with antibiotics.
NEW YORK, August 9, 2009 - An estimated 200,000 Americans will die needlessly from preventable medical mistakes and hospital infections this year, according to "Dead By Mistake," a wide-ranging Hearst national investigation, which began reporting the findings today [www.deadbymistake.com/]. Despite an authoritative federal report 10 years ago that laid out the scope of the problem and urged the federal and state governments and the medical community to take clear and tangible steps to reduce the number of fatal medical errors,a staggering 98,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors each year and just as many from hospital-acquired infections.
Oct. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Hospitals will no longer get paid for some
specific treatment errors, including infections, bed sores and
objects left inside patients after surgery, under a new Medicare
policy.
The case of actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins, who were reportedly given 1,000 times the intended dosage of a blood thinner at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, underscores one of the biggest problems facing the healthcare industry: medication errors. At least 1.5 million Americans a year are injured after receiving
the wrong medication or the incorrect dose, according to the Institute
of Medicine, part of the National Academies of Science. Such incidents
have more than doubled in the last decade. The numbers can be worrisome -- 1 out of 10 hospitalized patients picks up an infection or suffers some kind of mistake while in the hospital, statistics show. And the stories are frightening -- Dennis Quaid's newborn babies were given a huge overdose of a drug two months ago at a hospital with a top-notch reputation. So what is a medical consumer to do? Should we all be afraid
to go to the hospital? One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes, according to a report being released today by two nonprofit groups that are urging all hospitals in the state to install a computerized prescription ordering system. The report is the first large-scale study of preventable prescription
errors in community hospitals, and its author, Dr. David Bates
of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised
that these mistakes were so frequent in these community hospitals.
Previous studies in large academic hospitals that also lacked
computerized systems found such medication errors occurred less
than half as often, he said. The third report since 2004 on how California hospitals treat pneumonia confirmed that where patients go can mean the difference between living and dying. Patients at the worst - performing hospitals were twice as likely to die as those at the best-ranked hospitals. Read full article here... Correction Appended One morning not long ago, I got a call from the emergency room
at my hospital. A young man — an intern, in fact, who had
been on rounds that morning — had been admitted with chest
pains…. Afterward, in the control room, heat rose to my
face as colleagues wandered in to inquire about what was going
on. “How could we have missed this?” I asked aloud…. Hoping to draw attention to medical errors that kill as many
as 100,000 Americans a year, actor Dennis Quaid gives a detailed
account for the first time on television of the medical mistakes
that nearly killed his newborn twins.
High-profile medical errors such as operating on the wrong body
part or receiving a mistaken dose of drugs should take a back
seat to a far more common and insidious mistake, a new report
reveals.
MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Only about half of U.S. pediatricians surveyed in a new study said they'd disclose a medical error to the family of a child under their care. Many said they were much more likely to admit the error when it was an obvious one. Medication errors, never a pleasant subject, are particularly
tricky when it comes to children and their often protective parents,
experts say. |
|||
 |
|
|
|
Hospitals Sign On To Surgical Checklists| Home
/ About the Book
/ About the Author
/ BUY the Book
Copyright©
2009 Martine Ehrenclou. All Rights Reserved.
|
