Accidental Deaths In Hospitals Very High, New Guidelines Issued

When I attended the Author 101 seminar last the weekend, I met so many people who want to write a book because they want to make a difference. I talked about women helping women in this blog, and then I was interested to see this article that concerned a topic that another person I met was pursuing.

She told me the story of how her husband died because of an error made by a medical doctor. Apparently, he had a concussion, and was given a sleeping pill later that night. I know little about medicine, but as a person who has had numerous concussions, I know that it was procedure to wake me every couple of hours to make sure I was okay.

Her story was painful and according to this NBC article, more than 440,000 deaths were caused by errors made in hospitals last year.

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New guidelines that were printed in the New England Journal of Medicine today have been created to dictate something else--how medical personnel must act when they see a colleague make a mistake. It seems that not only were there many mistakes being made, but also that the mistakes were being covered by co-workers as some sort of protection for each other.

Many of the mistakes are minor that may cause little more than discomfort. Others turn into fatal mistakes.

“There have been cases of a radiologist missing a very small tumor that a year later becomes a very large tumor,” he said. “About once a year, there’s a bad one, with a bad outcome.”

Source - NBC.com