Hospital Patients Still in Danger from Preventable Errors

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Fierce Healthcare reports that leading experts recently told a US Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging that, despite public attention and concern, hospital patients today are no safer from harms caused by preventable errors than they were 15 years ago. In terms of error reduction and quality improvement, “[w]e have not moved the needle in any meaningful, demonstrable way overall,” Fierce Healthcare quotes Harvard School of Public Health’s Ashish Jha stating.

Experts recommended establishing a National Patient Safety Board like the existing National Transportation Safety Board, and called for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to require hospitals to publish individual facilities’ infection rates and adverse outcomes such as complications or deaths from surgeries, reports Fierce Healthcare. The article includes a link to watch the original testimonies.

Patients remain in danger from preventable errors (Fierce Healthcare, July 18, 2014)

3 COMMENTS

    • I agree, the doctors have been given a license to kill, within a system that ensures they will not be held accountable. Which has left us with a medical community filled with unrepentant murderers – since medical “mistakes” are at least the third leading cause of death in the US, and there aren’t that many malpractice suits.

      We need to bring back autopsies for all patients who die in hospitals, and even all dealing with outpatient care. Accountability is the only way the astronomical numbers of iatrogenic deaths are going to end.

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  1. I was reading the Hansards from parliament on a question put to the Minister for Mental Health about a young man who was snatched off the street, taken to a hospital who thought he was someone else and given their drugs nearly killing him.

    The Ministers response was that mental health is being scrutinised more than ever before. And this fixes the problem how? Looking at the problem and talking about it for years doesn’t get it fixed, you have to actually do something.

    The answer is in B post above, accountability. Particularly where short cuts are being used to get the job done.

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