Warning! For Your Consideration

[Minor Axis]

Newsweek: Are Hospitals Less Safe Than We Think

Incredibly alarming report in Newswek, Sept 2012.

When I was a medical student, modern medicine began to seem as dangerous and dishonest as it was miraculous and precise. The defining moment came when I saw a sweet old lady I cared about die after a procedure she didn’t need and didn’t want.

She ended up dieing...

A host of new studies examining the current state of health care indicates that approximately one in every five medications, tests, and procedures is likely unnecessary.

While patients are encouraged to think that the health-care system is competent and wise, it’s actually more like the Wild West. The shocking truth is that some prestigious hospitals participating in a national collaborative to measure surgical complications have four to five times more complications as other hospitals.

Years ago, one of my favorite public-health professors, Harvard surgeon Dr. Lucian Leape, opened the keynote speech at a national surgeons’ conference by asking the thousands of doctors there to “raise your hand if you know of a physician you work with who should not be practicing because he or she is too dangerous.” Every hand went up. Doing the math, I figured that each one of these dangerous doctors probably sees hundreds of patients each year, which would put the total number of patients who encounter the dangerous doctors known to this audience alone in the hundreds of thousands.

If, say, only 2 percent of the nation’s 1 million doctors are seriously impaired or fraudulent (and most experts agree that 2 percent is a low estimate), that would mean 20,000 impaired or fraudulent doctors are practicing medicine. If each one of these doctors typically sees 500 patients each year, then 10 million people are seeing impaired or fraudulent doctors annually.

Apparently the solution is to stop covering up and publicize statistics, including fatality statistice to the public. I have no idea if this is happening in my neighborhood (Houston, Texas).

But there is a solution: if any of this information—lists of sanctioned doctors, or employee-safety surveys, or hospital readmission rates—were made fully public, positive results would reverberate throughout the health-care system. The effect would likely be a global reduction in patient harm and a rise in customer satisfaction. We know that because it has been done—once.

In the early 1990s, New York state set out to address the horrific patterns of bad outcomes that health officials had heard about in some of the state’s heart hospitals. Mark Chassin, who became health commissioner in 1992, didn’t want to just slap wrists. Instead, he and his team did something radical: they made heart-surgery death rates public. Instantly, New York heart hospitals with high mortality rates scrambled to improve.

 

[MainerMikeBrown]

Hospitals will never be completly safe, and their not much I can do about it. So I won't worry about it.

 

[darkcgi]

man lives in greed, until that day stops this kind of thing will never stop.

 

[Alien Allen]

I wonder if part of it is the fact some hospitals are getting to be so large. The bigger it is the more difficult to control things.

I have a relative who twice now within 3 years was operated on and ended up with MERSA. There is no excuse for that. The first time maybe. But the 2nd time after knowing he had already fought it there should have been greater precautions.

Another relative picked up CDEF which took over a year and a lot of money to get over.

MERSA can be picked up outside a hospital but one is more likely to get it in a hospital. CDEF as I understand it has only occurred due to contact in a hospital.

 

[Minor Axis]

My Father In Law just went through an experience... he has a bad heart and a defibrillator pace maker. Everyone including him, knows that this thing is going to shock him, because his heart beat often becomes irregular. Recently he has 3 shocks in one night and decided to go to the Emergency Room. Big mistake. You go into an ER and they are going to try to fix you. Except his heart can't be fixed and what he went through with the tests, complications due to those tests and the setbacks he experienced, they knocked him down significantly and he ended up spending 4 months in the hospital- therapy to get him out of there. Under his circumstances, he should not have gone in the first place. A doctor told us that the defibrillator will keep the heart beating better than anything they can do in the hospital. My experience with the family indicates that the last 5 years of the life is when the most is spent on health care. I question whether it is worth the expense to keep someone going for another 6-12 months if it undermines the health system?

 

[Dana]

I'm not surprised or shocked.

 

[Alien Allen]

I have a relative with inoperative terminal brain cancer. Was given a year to live. That was 3 years ago. Quality of life is lousy. Can't do anything without major assistance, can't put two words together. Yet they continued with MRI's and other tests. Nothing is going to change. He is dieing but they live a pipe dream thinking it will improve so they allow for continuing tests.

We need medical savings accounts that are as easy to get as signing up for a checking account. Make it after tax money with no charges for earnings it makes. What ever is left when you die can be transferred to a spouse or your children with no penalty as long as it is used for medical things. If there is no close relative to give to or you want somebody to inherit it then a flat 15% tax would be applied to it and they can use it as they see fit. If they roll it into a medical account there would be a 5% tax.

 

[Jackass master]

After my experiences in 2007 I have seriously thought of getting a tattoo that says no heroics put on my chest. Struggling with whether to get a new ICD this spring as the battery is about shot in mine. Got an infection when I got this one and had to go to the wound center for 6 weeks to get it taken care of.