It’s the start of flu season and you might be worried about the spread of germs. We’re worried too. Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project released a report today that found nearly half of all hospital workers in California didn’t get flu shots during the 2008-2009 flu season.

Last week’s good news of a decline in serious MRSA health care-acquired infections, is a victory for patient safety, but we still have a long way to go to eliminate this very preventable crisis.

Soon it will be easier for you to find out how well your hospital prevents certain infections. As part of the new health care reform law, the Department of Health and Human Services will require hospitals to publicly disclose several types of dangerous hospital infections.

On June 16, Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project and 11 patient safety advocates from 10 states attended the first “Consumer Conversation on Healthcare-Associated Infections” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.

A bill in California (SB 1390) would create a minimum of 12-point font for the most crucial information on medication labels and would require translation of medication label information into commonly used non-English languages.

Guest blog post from Kerry O’Connell of Conifer, Colorado. Kerry is a member of the Colorado Health Facility Acquired Infections Advisory Committee. A committed patient safety advocate, he calls for restoring empathy and compassion in health care.

This week the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a state-specific report (not hospital specific) on rates of central line-associated bloodstream infections (CLABSIs) in the ICU as collected by its National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), a monitoring system that looks at hospital infections across the nation.

An innovative "checklist" to reduce central line bloodstream infections in intensive care units has had incredible success in hospitals where it's been adopted.

Guest blog by Lori Nerbonne of NH Patient Voices--Death certificates are the primary source of important vital statistics in our country – yet too many certificates fail to tell the whole story.

Since 2006, California lawmakers have passed laws to improve patient safety, yet the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has been moving at turtle speed to enforce these laws.

Guest blog post by Deb Wachenheim, Health Quality Manager at Health Care For All (HCFA) in Boston. HCFA has launched a new website that can help patients in Massachusetts and across the country speak up when something goes wrong in the hospital. There is information on asking for help when you are in the hospital, advice on how to file a complaint, and resources available to help you.

Guest blog post written by Syed Sayeed, Policy Analyst at Consumers Union's West Coast Office. CU is calling on California residents to submit comments to the Pharmacy Board by March 10th, in support of requiring all pharmacies to print important label information in at least a 12-point font size.

Surgeon and author Atul Gawande, M.D., discusses the surgical checklist on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Our leaders in Congress experience medical harm, too. On Monday, Politico reported that Pennsylvania U.S. Congressman John Murtha had died as a result of complications from recent gallbladder removal surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a very clear statement today on public reporting of infection rates, prompted by the Consumer Reports article “Deadly Infections” – a real step forward!

Hospital-acquired infections rarely make national headlines, but today, “Deadly infections” hits magazine racks across America in the March 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, published by Consumers Union.

The Joint Commission (a private membership and hospital accreditation body) has released its 2009 Annual Report on Quality and Safety providing a summary of rates for performance measures for a number of evidence-based treatments for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care between 2002 and 2008.

On November 17, Consumers Union's Safe Patient Project is hosting a forum in Washington DC based on the 10-year anniversary of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) study on medical errors, “To Err Is Human.”

If your hospital had a blog, would you read it? More importantly, would you expect to see information that every patient deserves – such as hospital infection rates or harmful medical errors happening there?

Learn about MRSA from the people who have had personal experiences with this harmful superbug.

What if a fun trip to the beach meant you’d be exposed to MRSA? As recently reported by USA TODAY, researchers have identified this antibiotic-resistant MRSA superbug on five beaches in Washington State.

You’ve heard of UFOs but have you heard of RFOs? 194 Pennsylvanians could tell you about their RFO encounter last year – that’s how many cases of “retained foreign objects” were reported to that state’s Patient Safety Authority in 2008.

A new documentary, Money-Driven Medicine, offers a thoughtful perspective to the health care reform debate that couldn’t be timelier.

Read and sign the Patient Safety Advocates' Statement on Health Care Reform.

Check out this new collection of medical errors reporting: "Dead by Mistake"