Today's SF Chron lead story

Post #312,340 by Ashton 8/9/09 2:34:18 PM Reply	Today's SF Chron lead story delves into the asserted 98K/year 'deaths via medical mishap'. http://www.sfgate.co...09/MNN9191URO.DTL 98,000 Reasons Why: Should you ever be so unfortunate as to 'enter' a US hospital ... NEVER do so sans your personal Ombudsman, who scrutinizes charts, med lists, observes aides with hypos and double-checks their exact content AND QTY, etc. (And queries medicos -- if you cannot -- until satisfied that they have spent more than the usual 3 minutes assessing / before moving on to their next group project. Hmmm.. beats car crashes, most warz (when averaged) ... we're Sooo good at sports stats.
Post #312,341 by Another Scott 8/9/09 3:47:25 PM Reply	Not to mention all the non-fatal mistakes... I think I've mentioned these before - just a couple of examples I know about: 1) Friend's step father: Had some serious discomfort in his chest when breathing. Dr. had X-rays taken. Diagnosis - lung cancer. Rapidly-scheduled surgery that involved a 4-foot long incision that wrapped around his back, etc. Lots of pain, lots of pain meds, lots of recovery time. Undoubtedly, lot of expense for his insurance policy and/or Medicare. Pathology report on the stuff removed: scar tissue from old lung infections, not cancer. 2) Father in law temporarily in a nursing home for rehab after a brief hospitalization to install a trache tube to ease his breathing. After a day or so, he was nearly comatose. The nurses and aids talked about how great he was doing - "See, he can touch his face with a wash cloth!", as he sat in a wheel chair and did almost nothing. Turns out, they were crushing his time-released morphine pills and giving them to him with his other crushed medications. So rather than getting, say, 30 mg of morphine over 8 hours, he was getting it over a few minutes. And that was one of the better nursing homes around here... One often hears stories of surgery nearly being done on the wrong leg, though apparently operating rooms are getting better at using markers to make big X's and say "Other Leg!" and similar... I've also heard several stories from friends over the years who said that nurses had killed patients sharing their room by giving them the wrong meds, or the wrong dose. I'm sure its relatively common (as the SFC story points out). You're right that everyone who is hospitalized needs an individual advocate. It's too easy for mistakes to be made, too often with serious or deadly consequences. Cheers, Scott.
Post #312,342 by mhuber 8/9/09 4:45:28 PM Reply	That "Other Leg" marker thing is YOUR job, not the pro's. I'm wondering when it will be a profession to sit in a hospital and make sure they don't screw up. Probably about the time that "being screwed by your insurance company" insurance becomes available. I think there is a real market for both.
Post #312,344 by Ashton 8/9/09 7:01:14 PM Reply	Love that last! ... new CDO industry? The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken
Post #312,352 by drook 8/9/09 10:05:48 PM Reply	There's already a method, don't need a whole new profession I read a story (probably linked from here) about a doc who made what amounts to a pre-flight checklist for docs and nurses to maintain. Every hospital that adopted them showed a dramatic decrease in infections, complications, and recovery time. But doctors keep fighting them, with the same bullshit excuses they used in the 1800s when they were told to wash their hands. (By the way, poor hand washing by doctors is still one of the top causes of hospital-borne infections.) -- Drew
Post #312,356 by static 8/9/09 10:56:36 PM Reply	Basic habits. It would be far too scandalous, but imagine if a hospital started only hiring doctors who had that automatic hygience trained into them since childhood. Or if medical schools started turning away applicants without that habit. Wade. Q:Is it proper to eat cheeseburgers with your fingers? A:No, the fingers should be eaten separately.

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