Showing posts with label medical error deaths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical error deaths. Show all posts

Monday, December 19, 2016

Medical Errors Are Now The Leading Cause of Death

There’s a New Leading Cause of Death in Town
Gretchen LeFever Watson
If you aren’t concerned about being treated in a hospital you should be. Every day over one thousand U.S. hospital patients die and many more are harmed by the medical care they receive, leading to at least 400,000 needless deaths. If you don’t relate well to statistics, this means that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in the United States—far ahead of deaths due to auto accidents, diabetes, and everything else except cancer and heart disease.
As healthcare leader Leah Binder describes it, these numbers mean “hospitals are killing off the equivalent of the entire population of Atlanta one year, Miami the next, then moving to Oakland, and on and on. The equivalent of four Vietnam Memorials would need to be built each year to capture the names of U.S. hospital patients who die as a result of healthcare-induced harm.
Medical care has become incredibly sophisticated as well as overwhelmingly complicated and fractured. That’s why medical mistakes are now an every-day occurrence.
You’re Never Far from a Terrible Medical Mistake
We aren’t talking about people dying from illnesses that caused them to seek care in the first place. We are also not talking about complications that result from procedures where known risks are perceived as worthwhile compared to the likely outcome if the procedure is not performed. Patient safety events refer to wrongful events of healthcare-induced harm. These events are not due to breakdowns in complex medical decision-making or the lack of access to care.
Most often, patient safety events involve basic human error—especially errors of omission. As Megan McArdle, author of The Upside of Down, notes: “None of us is ever very far from a terrible medical mistake.” So, what does a terrible medical mistake look like?
It is the mother-to-be who had the wrong embryo transplanted into her womb because the in vitro clinic didn’t use the universally approved preoperative checklist, leaving the mother to cope with a court order to share custody of the child with a complete stranger—the man whose sperm was used to create the embryo that grew to be her baby.
It is the newborn whose heart stops after receiving a medication dose that was calculated for an adult because an overworked pharmacist made a mistake and a nurse did not double check the order before injecting the drug into the baby’s IV.
Every single day, basic human and system errors kill 1,000 hospital patients and cause serious harm to another 10,000 to 20,000. Nobody is immune—not doctors, nurses, or hospital CEOs. The fallout from basic human and system error strikes newborn babies, pregnant mothers, and the elderly. It has happened to me and it could happen to you.
The Underreported Disaster and Its Untapped Resource
In an average week more patients will die from the medical care they receive in US hospitals than the total number of people who died in natural disasters between 2005 and 2015, including Hurricane Katrina and the massive earthquakes in Nepal. While hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters make national news and receive round-the-clock coverage, the patient safety death toll climbs week after week with scant media attention or public awareness.
Along with the press coverage of natural disasters comes thousands of people who freely give their time, talent, and resources to help stabilize the situation and heal the afflicted. If the American public understood the magnitude of the patient safety crisis and had a clear idea of how they could make hospitals safer, they would offer a helping hand. But here’s the rub: even if the public stepped up to help, healthcare workers aren’t prepared to accept their help.

If the best clinicians, scientists, regulators, and policymakers working in tandem haven’t been able to solve this problem, why should anyone expect the solution to depend on getting the general public involved? After all, we are talking about a vexing problem that occurs during the course of complex clinical care within an industry that operates at a rapid pace, under the toll of extensive regulation, and in the midst of a constantly changing knowledge base. So, you might wonder, why complicate the problem by getting the general public involved?
The truth is that the general public cannot solve the patient safety crisis on its own any more than hospitals can. Radically improving patient safety will require meaningful collaboration—a true partnership—among providers and patients, and between hospitals and the communities they serve. Such collaboration must be the norm; it must not remain a lofty ideal or the exception to the rule. And waiting until patients are hospitalized, or about to be hospitalized, to prepare them for their roles and responsibilities for safe care amounts to too little too late.
Zeroing In For Success
As I discussed in a recent issue of Society (The Hospital Safety Crisis), a fundamental change in our nation’s approach to and assumptions about patient safety is in order. The change must center on engaging patients for the purpose of collaborating with healthcare providers to eliminate a small but powerful subset of patient safety’s most frequently recurring problems.
Laudable as comprehensive quality/safety efforts are for advancing medical science, as organization-wide programs or initiatives designed to improve day-to-day safety at the bedside, they set healthcare workers up for failure, disappointment, and disillusion. Greater return on investment can be realized by focusing on getting providers en masse to exhibit excellent performance around a defined and manageable set of safety habits. Because safety depends on patients being part of the solution, it is all the more important to focus on habits they too can recognize, request, and/or use.
Doing Less to Achieve More
Psychologists who specialize in behavior change know that people are capable of addressing only one or two new behavioral habits or routines at a time. The same holds true for establishing organizational habits.
In the years since the hospital safety crisis was first publicly exposed (see To Err is Human, 1999), the field of patient safety has identified specific strategies that have the capacity to eliminate the vast majority of hospital deaths due to a handful of issues that, as a group, compromise the majority of all preventable deaths. This group includes healthcare-associated infections (e.g., superbugs like MRSA, pronounced mursa), off-the mark procedures (e.g., surgeries on the wrong person or body part), and medication administration errors.
Strategies to prevent this group of events involve simple, quick, and practically cost-free actions such as use of proper handwashing techniques, checklists, and double-check. Because these events represent the most prevalent, predictable, and preventable types of patient harm, you can think of them as a trifecta of sorts.
The trifecta of preventable infections, procedural mix-ups, and medication mistakes constitute exactly the sort of problems that can be successfully addressed through public awareness and education campaigns.
Our Best Hope for Success
No matter how sophisticated the science of medicine or clinical care delivery systems become, it is an inescapable reality that ensuring patient safety is often a function of forming and sustaining simple safety habits among the millions of nurses, physicians, pharmacists, therapists, support staff, and others who affect the lives of patients every day. The breadth and volume of people who must exhibit safety habits begs for a unified, straightforward, and manageable approach.
The work before us calls for a paradigm that is comprehensible to everyone regardless of rank or role and that unifies efforts of hospitals, public health, and society overall.

To the extent they are capable, providers and consumers of healthcare need to know and exercise their roles and responsibilities for eliminating healthcare’s current trifecta of safety events. Building accountability around the safety habits that can eliminate these recurring serious safety events depends on creating a greater sense that providers are accountable to their patients while also preparing patients to speak up when they observe lapses in their healthcare.
In order to change the behavior of healthcare providers, we must influence the behavior of the patients around them. Whatever reasons have existed for treating hospital safety as an in-house matter, it is time to take this issue to the streets. How ready are you to help protect yourself and others from unnecessary healthcare harm?

Sunday, September 6, 2015

One-third of Nursing Home Patients Suffer From Medical Errors

One-third of Nursing Home Patients Suffer From Medical Errors

Medicare patients suffer from widespread medical mistakes at nursing homes


One-third of all Medicare patients treated at skilled nursing facilities suffered some form of harm from medication errors, medical mistakes or infections, according to a government investigation that raises red flags about the quality of America’s health care as the industry transitions to Obamacare.
The investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found that 59 percent of the adverse patient events were preventable and that more than half required patients to be admitted to care at a hospital or other facility.



Numerous patients — about 1.5 percent of those exposed to harm — died as a result of the mistakes, the report found.
The adverse events are harmful to taxpayers as well, costing an estimated $2.8 billion a year in additional hospitalizations, the report found.
Nursing homes are the most common type of skilled nursing facilities or SNFs, which are a growing part of America’s medical system as the baby-boomer generation ages. President Obama’s health care law envisions them continuing to play an important role going forward, raising the stakes for the problems unmasked in the investigation.
“Because many of the events that we identified were preventable, our study confirms the need and opportunity for SNFs to significantly reduce the incidence of resident-harm events,” the inspector general concluded.

Click HERE to read more
Investigators said 22 percent of Medicare patients developed serious medical problems as a result of their stay, many of which required hospitalization to treat.
The most common mistake investigators found had to do with medication, usually with nursing staff giving patients the wrong kind or wrong dosages, or patients having an allergic reaction to the meds.
Medicare, one of the largest government programs in terms of spending, has often drawn criticism from Capitol Hill lawmakers who say the program isn’t doing enough to combat waste or isn’t transparent.
“Taxpayers have a right to see how their dollars are being spent,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, a leading advocate for spending reform, last year. “There shouldn’t be a special exception for hard-earned dollars that happen to be spent through Medicare.”
Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, said at a committee hearing last year that the government must be mindful of the cost of the program and how much mistakes can not only hurt patients, but cost taxpayers.
“As more and more baby boomers retire and health care costs continue to rise, Medicare spending could reach $1 trillion by 2023,” he said.  “Reducing hospital readmissions will not only save the Medicare program billions, it will save beneficiaries from potential infection and further out-of-pocket expense.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they are compiling lists of the most common medical mistakes, and preparing better training for doctors on how to avoid the mishaps.
“CMS fully concurs with [the inspector general] on the importance of identifying avoidable adverse events among nursing-home residents and improving the quality of life and care for nursing-home residents,” a response from the agency said.
The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, will require nursing homes and similar facilities to report their safety records to federal watchdogs. The inspector general said it’s too soon to tell if this will have a noticeable impact on reducing medical mistakes.
In addition to the harm done to patients, inspectors said, the mistakes were a large financial burden on Medicare for having to pay for hospital treatment.
“Most of these residents died at hospitals rather than in the SNFs where the harm occurred, having been transferred back to the hospitals for higher-level treatment as a result of the event,” the inspector general said.

Hospital trips owning to mistakes by medical staff cost taxpayers $2.8 billion in a single year, according to the report. But, the inspector general warned, “the full costs associated with these events are likely greater than our estimate.”

Saturday, May 9, 2015

How Doctors Almost Killed Proud FA's Niece and My Goddaughter

For my new readers, Proud FA is a bosom buddy and the former dean of feederism. Proud's sister (We will call her Sarah.) had all sorts of problems with uterine  fibrosis and endometriosis. Her doctor sent her for a hysterectomy. Her doctor had told her that she could not get pregnant due to the fibrosis. Like most American doctors her doctor was wrong. Proud's sister could indeed get pregnant and an ultrasound just before the surgery showed that she was pregnant. Proud's sister nor was ever informed of this fact.

There was a heated argument between a nurse, the ultrasound tech and the doctor who was scheduled to perform the hysterectomy. The doctor wanted to go ahead with the hysterectomy but the nurse would have none of it. She quickly informed Proud FA and his brother in law that Sarah was indeed pregnant and that the doctor and his crew of butchers were going to perform the hysterectomy in spite of the fact that Sarah was pregnant. Needless to say that when Proud FA found out he was livid. Proud FA loves kids and the thought of some scumbag doctor aborting his sister's baby was to much for him. Proud FA has a strong protective instinct especially when it comes to children.

I got a call from Proud FA's wife Thinnette begging me to meet her at the hospital to help her talk Proud down. She was sure he would get himself arrested for a attacking the scum bag doctor. I called Proud's cell phone and made him promise not to do anything until I got there. He agreed and I grabbed Thinnette and we took off for the hospital post haste. She stayed with Proud in the phone while I drove.



I had to physically restrain Proud while Thinnette rounded up all involved. We wanted to make sure that the nurse was correct about Sarah being pregnant. The nurse claimed that there was a fetal heartbeat seen on the ultra-sound. I located the technologist and when he began to try to bullshit me I explained that if I pointed him out to Proud FA that Proud FA would tear his head off. For those of you who don't know Proud FA, Proud FA's other nickname is ET or Extra Testicle. Proud is one o these guys with an extra Y chromosome. I have seen the 5'9" 160 pound Proud beat the crap out of men twice his size. Any guy who can eat the pussy of fat girl and fuck 10 of them a night is nobody to trifle with.  Not only did the tech admit that the Sarah was pregnant he provided up with the images that showed a female fetus.

A healthy Millicent is now three years old and her Uncle Proud FA beams with pride for his first niece and I, Fat Bastardo am equally thrilled that she is my goddaughter.

As usual the doctor and the hospital continue their criminal activity. They fired the nurse for informing Proud and Sarah's husband and the technologist also threw the nurse under the bus so that he could keep his job.

The nurse who has filed suit against the hospital does not see herself as a hero although all of us involved see her as one. Proud and Thinnette send her a gift card every Christmas. Sarah speaks with her frequently and she is now been adopted as an aunt to Millicent.

The scumbag doctor who would have killed Millicent did not even receive a reprimand from the hospital board of the state medical board. And just when I thought it could not get any sleazier both the hospital and doctors sent Sarah a bill.

Saturday, April 18, 2015

The Medical Holocaust





The following letter to the editor, local medical consumers and the local medical industry can best be described as a fact enema aimed at the anal apertures who comprise the American medical industry.

The leading cause of preventable death and injury in America is the medical industry. In addition to doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical device companies being the biggest killers of Americans they are also the biggest thieves. According to Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina 1/3 of what Americans spend on health care is waste and fraud. That number is actually low. It is probably more like 50%. Using the Blue Cross's numbers the actual dollar amount would be $750 billion in theft annually. That is more than what the US spends on national defense. 

The Affordable Care Act aka Obama Care now mandates that all Americans buy health insurance that only infuses more money into the most corrupt and dangerous industry in the history of mankind. Obamacare is a giveway that by 2020 will make health care 25% of the US GDP. They world average currently is 6% of a country's GDP.

Medical errors alone kill at least 440,000 Americans each year. Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety and NPR that says the numbers may be correct between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death. This is based on what gets reported. How Many Die From Medical Mistakes In U.S. Hospitals?  (Google it.)

Nosocomial infections aka health care acquired infections are another cause of preventable death and injury. Estimates range from 1 in 9 hospital patients to 1 in 25 hospital patients who contract an infection. Many states don't report and that accounts for the wide range of numbers. Hospital acquired infections are 100% preventable but they increase profits. Doctors have so misused antibiotics that they have created many resistant super bugs.  (Google it.)

The companies that face the largest CRIMINAL fines are the drug companies. In 2012 GlaxoSmith was fined $3 billion in criminal fines but of course nobody was prosecuted or even arrested. (Google it.)

 Dr Oz is a known prolific liar and Senator Claire McCaskill in a senate hearing told him as much. (Google it.) HLN's Doctor Drew accepted $275,000 illegal kickbacks from Glaxo Smith Kline and $125,000 from Janson Pharmaceuticals to promote the dangerous drug Welbutrin for off label use.  (Google it.) Fox's Dr Keith Ablow should be put in a cage.  

Your doctors is a bribe taker. Most doctors are bribe takers. They take at least $3.5 billion in monetary bribes alone. Google "doctor kickbacks" and you will see that the doctor industry is rife with criminal misconduct. If your think your doctor is not a bribe taker think again. On a regular bases shills aka sale reps from the drug companies bring doctors and their often anti social staffs expensive breakfasts and lunches. This may explain why so most of them are overweight and obese. Many medical conventions that MDs attend for their continuing educations units are sponsored by the big pharma and very little education actually takes place. It's party time for your doctor.

Google this. Type in the words "doctors are" into Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine and see what suggestions you get. Then place a letter after the words, "doctors are" and see what you get. I say this to the people who are inclined to make the fact free declaration, "Most doctors are good and there are only a few bad apples" To them I would ask, If most doctors are "good" then why do we have the most corrupt, deadly and most expensive health care in the industrialized world? Let it suffice to say that most Americans have as much disdain for doctors as the do for members of congress. I would go so far to say to the doctors and their apologists that American medical doctors and their industry are more evil than ISIS because the nut jobs in ISIS actually believe what they are doing is what their Koran expects of them. The medical industry knows that what they are doing is wrong and completely immoral but they have no problem continuing their greedy exploitation of disease and human suffering. If I were God sitting in judgment of ISIS and the members of the American industry I would give ISIS members a few centuries in purgatory to prepare them for Heaven but I would see the souls of American MDs and their industry puppeteers beyond redemption and I would with the same lack of  remorse they have, while sending them to hell for all eternity. I sure hope that there is a just god that's his the plan. For now I would like to sit on the edge of creation and drop fact filled turds on them to prepare them for eternal torment.