Medical Errors & Patient Safety - New HHS Study Identifies Problems
Despite what large parts of the healthcare and insurace industries, politicians, and other "tort reform" groups would like the American people to believe, we all know that medical error can cause injury and even death. The odds are you have heard stories of patient being harmed or worse because of errors by nurses, doctors, physician's assistants, or teams of medical professionals working together. Many times, fortunately, the damage is only temporary and can be fixed by other, competant medical professionals. However, all too often, the damage is permanent. Either way, the problem is real. Attemps to cover-up the problem or blame some phantom healthcare litigation crisis will not make it go away.
You may be suprised to learn that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recognizes the problem as well. Since 1999, HHS was worked to identify, standardize, encourage reporting of, and eliminate medical error on a national scale. Their website provides a year-by-year breakdown of projects, initiatives, studies, and publications that have tried to minimize the damage done by medical error. The effort has been headed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Interestingly, over this decade of work the Institute of Medicine "noted that many of the errors in health care result from a culture and system that is fragmented, and that improving health care needs to be a team sport. Research indicated that mistakes were not due to clinicians not trying hard enough; they resulted from inherent shortcomings in the health care system." This conclusion squares well with knowledge that plaintiff's lawyers have learned over years of trying cases: that many times, the error cannot be blamed on any one individual, but rather is usually a series of unfortunate events with multiple, untaken opportunities for correction that culminate that cause the injury.
This website is a must for anyone who is preparing for or undergoing a stay at a hospital or other healthcare facility. These lists of best practices 30 Safe Practices for Better Health Care and 10 Patient Safety Tips for Hospitals are a great way to see if the healthcare facility that you are a patient of is actively working to make their environment less likely to have medical errors resulting in harm to patients. There is much more valuable information at the website that is too voluminous to link to here, but you should definitely check it out.
If you or a loved one have been injured by unnecessary medical error and would like to talk with someone about it, please contact the personal injury attorneys at Bahe Cook Cantley & Jones PLC to see if we are able to help.
