(8/24, Dunham) reported,
"While the White House acknowledges that hospital medical errors are ‘a big and serious problem,’ a senior administration official says President Barack Obama does not favor a mandatory reporting system for all medical mistakes, just for infections."
The Administration argues for this separation because "while infections can be easily documented, not every medical mistake is a clear-cut error on the scale of the amputation of the wrong limb or application of the wrong drug." The official said, "Once you get past the clear cases, it gets a lot harder" to assign blame. "Many of the cases are much more ambiguous." Some supporters "say the White House might simply be making a pragmatic decision to postpone a fight over error reporting."
Hospitals said to be improving medical error disclosure.
In the Informed Patient column on the front of the
Wall Street Journal(8/25, D1) Personal Journal section, Laura Landro writes on the trend of hospitals being more open after medical errors. In an effort to avoid lawsuits and eventually improve hospital safety, the hospitals are offering greater disclosure to patients after errors. Landro writes that there is some indication patients are less likely to sue after full disclosure and offered compensation. Landro also recounts specific instances of hospitals disclosing medical errors then creating new programs to avoid the same errors happening in the future. Online, the
Wall Street Journal(8/25) also runs a slide show concerning hospital errors.
Cecelia Prewett of the American Association of Justice (AAJ) writes today that trial attorneys support medical reform that improves patient safety and reduces avoidable medical injuries to patients. Her articles are important sources of the real facts about medical errors and patient injury and death.
Hearst News Analysis Highlights Epidemic of Medical Errors – By Cecelia Prewett
Confronting Medical Errors Will Improve Health Care – By Cecelia Prewett
Tort Reform No Cure For What Ails Our Health Care System – By Cecelia Prewett
Reducing medical errors will not be accomplished by taking away patients’ legal rights. You don’t have to be a college professor to see that. Medical errors are cured by better medical training, better hospital procedures, more time spent by the doctor working on the patient’s treatment. The fact that a patient can sue a doctor for sloppy or careless medical work is, if anything, an incentive for the doctor to do a good job. As parents do with their kids, holding a doctor accountable for sloppy or careless work is a good thing. We all live under that golden rule. We have seen 20 years of legislation and court decisions favoring the medical profession and making it harder and harder to hold a doctor responsible for avoidable medical errors. What has that done to lessen injury and death? Even the Wall Street Journal, usually an apologist for the insurance industry and doctors who injure their patients, reports the problem:
Medical errors kill as many as 98,000 Americans each year, according to the Institute of Medicine, a government advisory group. In an effort to improve this record, some hospitals like Baptist Children’s are taking steps to admit grievous mistakes and to learn from them in order to overhaul flawed procedures. That represents a sharp departure from hospitals’ traditional response when something goes terribly wrong—retreating behind a wall of silence to guard against potential lawsuits.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. When will the news media and the politicians come clean with the public and direct the focus in health care on improving the quality of care, not punishing the victims of doctor and hospital negligence by taking away the victim’s rights.
