Comfortably Numb
2,080. 40 times per week. That’s the number of wrong site surgeries still happening annually in hospitals and clinics across the US, according to a recently released study from The Joint Commission. I read the article with great interest yesterday morning as I was making my way through several airports traveling to a client site. As I walked through an airport I stopped to watch several news .jpg)
stations, expecting to see some outrage at such statistics. Maybe even a catchy new headline – “The War on Error”. I watched them all - CNN, Fox News, the political gamut – and saw…nothing. Not one story. Not even a passing interest.
Have medical errors become so much a part of the fabric of our healthcare system that this type of news doesn’t even merit a mention? Has getting the wrong care become not only accepted, but expected?
As healthcare reform continues to press forward, we continue to design fixes that will allow us to slowly evolve into a new delivery system, all while not changing our current system too much or too quickly. We seem to have agreed somewhere along the way that some frequency of errors is acceptable, and that we need to work on this slowly, lest we break the system we have worked so hard to create.
This study proves what we already know – our healthcare system is still broken. How long will we as a nation continue to tolerate slow and steady fixes to the system, and at what cost?
18 months ago, I had a similar reaction to a similar report: 10 years after the seminal "To Err is Human" report, medical errors, including preventable deaths, were on the rise. (We both defaulted to popular music references, too: Comfortably Numb and Ten Years After ....) For more, see: Ten Years After "To Err Is Human" (HealthBlawg) http://bit.ly/8zsLTU
As far as what we should be doing to combat this epidemic, I like the Lucian Leape Institute approach: gutsy, game-changing, will take a generation, and we should have started 10 years ago. See my post on the subject, with links worth following: Patient safety not taught in medical school? Lucian Leape Institute releases Unmet Needs: Teaching Physicians to Provide Safe Patient Care (HealthBlawg) http://bit.ly/bCDgD5
A culture of safety has to be promoted by physician and business leaders, and that promotion has to start immediately.
Mark,
Is the solution engagement of consumers on quality info, internal fixes in hospitals, changing the way we train surgeons, etc? Or all of the above. What approach do you think would have the best bang for your buck?
Josh