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Hospital Safety
Articles:
How safe is your hospital? Until patient safety and
reporting systems improve, you may never know
In November, Florida voters
approved a state constitutional amendment that finally
gives patients the right to review the records of any
healthcare facility's or provider's adverse medical
incidents, including those that could cause injury or
death. Previous law prohibited the practice.
The vote came in a year when Sarasota hospitals had
made headlines for several of these so-called "adverse
events," or medical mistakes. At Sarasota Memorial,
they included medication and transfusion errors. At
Doctors Hospital, an arthroscopic procedure was
performed on the wrong joint. The errors were reported
in the local press; but neither hospital released
public statements detailing the mistakes until
questioned by reporters, and the information they
offered was sketchy at best.
Hospitals have reasons to be skittish. In 1999, the
Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a groundbreaking
study called To Err is Human that claimed at least
44,000 (and perhaps as many as 98,000) Americans die
in hospitals each year as a result of preventable
medical errors. That's more than are lost to car
accidents, breast cancer and AIDS.
Healthcare costs for preventable medical errors reach
an estimated $50 billion annually; and they cost the
nation between $17 billion and $29 billion more every
year in additional care necessitated by the errors,
lost income and household productivity, and
disability.
To Err attributed our "nation's epidemic of medical
errors" to a decentralized and fragmented system,
where "faulty processes and conditions ... lead people
to make mistakes or fail to prevent them." It also
blamed the current medical liability system for
impeding efforts to uncover and learn from errors.
"The patient safety movement is only about five years
old," explains Jeff Gregg, Bureau Chief of Health
Facilities Regulation for Florida's Agency for
Healthcare Administration. "It is still trying to
decide how to perpetuate itself in a system that has
become so complicated."
Hospitals have employed safety officers for years, but
their function has been to oversee accidents in the
workplace.... |
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