Patient Safety Gone Wrong

You may not have heard, but it’s National Patient Safety Awareness Week. Certainly, who could argue with any group working to stop needless deaths and injuries due to unsafe medical care (which kills up to - or at least - 98,000 people a year, according to the Institute of Medicine)? But strange doesn’t half describe the way some are commemorating this week.

First off, a note about the National Patient Safety Foundation, which sponsors this event. The rabidly anti-civil justice American Medical Association was NPSF's founding sponsor, along with CNA/HealthPro and 3M.   When the Institute of Medicine report came out in 1999, one of its major recommendations was a mandatory reporting system for serious errors.  President Clinton at the time actually tried to get this done.  The AMA, along with the American Hospital Association, killed it. 

The AMA is commemorating National Patient Safety Week by focusing on medication errors – but not by trying to deal with the epidemic of medication errors in U.S. hospitals, which the Institute of Medicine says causes at least 7,000 deaths each year.  Instead, they are recommending “everyone to use National Patient Safety Awareness Week as an appropriate time for an annual check-up and clean-out of the medicine cabinet.”  

Then we have a state like Utah. The Utah Department of Health just released a report showing that “Utah hospitals continue to mistakenly leave equipment such as sponges inside patients -- many of them women undergoing obstetrical or gynecological surgeries”  and that these errors “were among the 101 ‘sentinel events’ reported by Utah hospitals and surgical clinics.” Spokesperson for the Department says, “The best way to prevent these events, which can be devastating to patients and their families, is to have a robust, transparent reporting system to monitor and track them … If we can better track these events we can work together with the health care industry to identify what's causing them and take steps to prevent them in the future.”  

Tell that to the AMA. 

Meanwhile, as if none of this was happening, some lawmakers in Utah are responding by pushing legislation to severely cap compensation for medical malpractice victims, basically weakening the accountable of hospitals and other health care providers for these kinds of errors, and practically ensuring that errors will increase. 

As I said, strange doesn’t half describe it.