Dallas-based Methodist Health System had two hospitals with bloodstream infection rates double the national average, according to a Consumer Reports study.
Consumer Reports has made an online system available which gives consumers access to hospital infection rates.
A comparison by Consumer Reports of Mercy with hospitals in Turlock and Modesto shows Mercy lags in all areas, including the average cost of a hospital stay.
The Consumer Reports Hospital Ratings study, released Tuesday, says North General Hospital's so-called central line infection rate was 394% worse than the national average - and the worst in the city.
NC makes it easier to find malpractice reports.
Radiation errors can cause severe harm or death for cancer patients.
California's largest health insurer is teaming with hospitals and doctors throughout the state to better share ways to improve patient safety and cut costs, leaders of the initiative said Tuesday.
NH plans to make medical errors and hospital infection information available to the public but does not have a date that they will be available. A very compelling video of medical error victim is also on this page.
Canandian medical error survivor Rhonda Nixon organized “The Empowered Patient Conference: Including the Patient in Patient Safety” conference. Speakers included Helen Haskell and Julia Hallisey, authors of "The Empowered Patient."
According to the California Medical Board, half of the doctors seeking to get lost licenses reinstated this past fiscal year were successful.
A December 2008 report by Health Affairs does find "unmistakable progress," despite setbacks. Critics say mandatory disclosure of medical errors is the key to breakthrough safety improvement.
Medically Injured Trauma Support Services (MITSS) honors Patty Skolnik for her work on patients safety through the organization she founded- Colorado Citizens for Accountability.
An LA Times/ProPublica investigation on nurses who were disciplined for medical errors in one state who hold nursing licenses and may continue to practice (and harm patients) in other states. Using public databases and state disciplinary reports, reporters found hundreds of cases in which registered nurses held clear licenses in some states after they'd been sanctioned in others, often for serious misdeeds. In California alone, a months-long review of its 350,000 active nurses found at least 177 whose licenses had been revoked, surrendered, suspended or denied elsewhere.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimate 7 percent of the state’s nursing home residents developed bed sores from 2007 to 2008. During the same time period, the state had the third-highest ranking for pressure ulcers in the country.
Leapfrog sites only five of U.S. News' 21 best hospitals. View Leapfrogs press release on the top hospitals list.
Firms that supply temporary nurses to the nation's hospitals are taking perilous shortcuts in their screening and supervision, sometimes putting seriously ill patients in the hands of incompetent or impaired caregivers.
A study published in the December 2nd Journal of the American Medical Assn. by an international group of researchers examined data on 13,796 adult patients from 1,265 hospitals in 75 countries who were unlucky enough to be in an intensive care unit on May 8, 2007. Here’s a summary of what they found: Fifty-one percent of ICU patients had some sort of infection, the longer you’re in the hospital, the more likely you are to become infected. The mortality rate for ICU patients with an infection was 25%, compared with 11% for patients without an infection. Infection rates in North America were slightly below average, at 48%, but the lowest rate was in Africa, at 46%. The highest infection rate was 60%, found in Central and South America.
To Err Is Human jump-started a movement to improve patient safety. How far have we come? Where do we go from here? Five patient safety "stakeholders" were interviewed for this article, including the Director of Consumers Union Safe Patient Project, Lisa McGiffert.
The forum was called "To Err is Human, to Delay is Deadly" in order to highlight the lack of progress the U.S. health care system has made since the Institute of Medicine's report "To Err is Human."
A state law intended to protect patients by making them aware of hospitals' errors has ended up making it easier for hospitals to avoid scrutiny. That's because when hospitals notify the state, the health department keeps most of those reports secret from the public.
Interview with Don Berwick, President of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement on the quality of care and patient safety.
The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, reports that wrong-site, wrong-side and wrong-patient procedures occur more than 40 times each week in the United States.
Rep. Bruce Braley highlighted the importance of improving patient safety in order to reduce medical malpractice.
Consumers Union Safe Patient Project Director Lisa McGiffert comments on wrong site surgery.
A new documentary film, "Money-Driven Medicine", tackles the economic underpinnings of an American healthcare system that kills four times as many people through medical error and preventable infections as die in highway accident. Consumers Union has encouraged activists to view this film and take action to make our health care system safer.
“Money-Driven Medicine” examines the medical industrial complex, and what’s wrong with our healthcare system. Watch the movie for free here until November 10 and sign our petition for reform.
For decades, the U.S. health care system has paid doctors and hospitals by the services performed, even if those services harmed the patient. Beginning in October 2008, Medicare will no longer pay for some major hospital mistakes.
Broward General Medical Center patients received reused IV bags and have tested positive for some infectious diseases.
Health care legislation now before Congress takes only modest steps to address a problem that is far more deadly than inadequate medical insuance -- medical error.
Many MRI patients are injected with a GE dye to enhance images. If they have weak kidneys, they might develop a rare and sometimes fatal disease.
The New Jersey Health Department has released the 2009 Hospital Performance Report.
The Dallas Morning News investigates the many holes in the Texas Medical Board review process over the past seven years, leaving patients at risk.
Of 11 facilities cited by the state, about half were penalized for leaving objects in patients after surgery.
Readmission rates were lower, but some death rates were up
Josie King, an 18 month old went to the hospital for burns from hot bath water and later died in the hospital from dehydration and medical error.
"The Derrick newspaper in nearby Oil City reported yesterday that "a failure to follow equipment sterilization guidelines" at the hospital resulted in "the notification of more than 100 surgical patients. "
"The American hospital, the center of health care, is a cottage industry in the post-industrial world, and we can save billions of dollars by bringing them into the modern world."- Clare Crawford Mason.
A determined breed of patient-safety advocates have forged their personal pain into a dedication to improving medical safety.
Mark your calendars for the MITSS (Medically Induced Trauma Support Services) annual dinner on Thursday, November 12, 5:30-9:30pm, at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. This is an opportunity to support an organization that does unique and important work supporting patients, families and medical providers impacted by adverse medical events. Learn more on the MITSS website.
Gov. Jon Corzine signed legislation yesterday giving residents more information about major preventable medical errors that occur in New Jersey hospitals. The law requires the state to release data identifying the hospitals responsible for making certain mistakes -- such as surgery performed on the wrong body part, the wrong person, or a sponge or medical tool left inside a patient following a procedure -- and the frequency they occur. It also prohibits hospitals from charging for some preventable medical errors.
A closer look at how families are calling for hospital rapid-response teams directly or at least to demand immediate medical attention from a senior physician if they feel a patient is in trouble and their concerns aren’t being met.
Tragic loss and patient advocacy has moved some hospitals to explore family-activated rapid-response teams. Patient advocates, Helen Haskell and Julia Hallisy, will launch a website later this month--empoweredpatientcoalition.org--that will help patients navigate the hospital system and encourage them to alert hospital staff if they sense something has gone wrong.
Bob Wachter writes: "I remain enthusiastic about 'no pay for preventable adverse events' as a clever way to use payment policy to goose the system into focusing on patient safety prevention practices. But for 'no pay...' to make a difference, there must be evidence-based prevention strategies to implement."
Letter to the editor on health care reform by patient safety activist Michael Bennett, President of the Coalition for Patients' Rights.
Features film trailer for “The Faces of Medical Error…From Tears to Transparency: The Story of Lewis Blackman” (son of patient safety activist Helen Haskell). This is the first in a new patient safety film series that addresses several critical health care issues: prevention of medical errors; how providers and institutions respond when care has caused harm; the important role patients and families can take in their care.
The Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) contains over four million reports of adverse events and reflects data from 1969 to the present. Data from AERS are presented here as summary statistics. These summary statistics cover data received over the last ten years.
A dozen New Jersey hospitals are paying doctors as an incentive to save the hospitals money.
Medical records were concealed at a Texas hospital involving the medical error death of Linda Carswell's husband. There was no follow up by the Texas Health Department on any complaints related to concealing or tampering with medical records at any hospital in the state, according to this KHOU investigation.
Despite an authoritative federal report 10 years ago that laid out the scope of the problem and urged the federal and state governments and the medical community to take clear and tangible steps to reduce the number of fatal medical errors, a staggering 98,000 Americans die from preventable medical errors each year and just as many from hospital-acquired infections.
Dead by mistake was researched and written by a team of journalists from across Hearst newspapers and television stations. Hearst describes medical errors as "a critical and neglected health care issue." Consumers Union's Safe Patient Project published a report on medical harm, "To Err is Human, To Delay is Deadly" in May 2009.
Consumers Union supports nationwide “MVP” reporting: mandatory, validated (meaning hospital data is audited) and public disclosure at a facility-specific level. Most state reporting systems now divulge only statewide information, which isn't much help to consumers.
"You can't say we weren't warned. And you can't say we've done enough to address those warnings about the degree of avoidable deaths in hospitals in New York and across the country."
Six years after the “To Err is Human” report, the Washington state Legislature responded with a law mandating medical error reports. State Rep. Tom Campbell, a bill sponsor, envisioned a day when patients could click on a Web site and compare hospitals' safety records.
Despite efforts to prevent medication errors, mix-ups like this are occurring across the country with alarming frequency.
The report, "Back to Basics," analyzed the results of scientific studies of treatment protocols for chronically recurring, avoidable medical errors.
The hospital accreditation experience of a Long Island hospital.
It's part of a nationwide trend spawned by a patient-safety movement after studies a decade ago found that errors in hospitals account for an estimated 40,000 to 90,000 deaths per year.
Op-ed by Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The Obama administration should take a lesson from the transportation safety board’s successes and establish an independent agency charged with identifying and eliminating the causes of medical error.
Letter to Editor from Lori Nerbonne thanking lawmakers for passing hospital infection and error reporting legislation.
There's a movement to make hard numbers the basis for rankings among hospitals, instead of reputation or word-of-mouth.
City-run hospitals faked records and covered up dozens of botched operations, deadly accidents, malpractice and other medical screwups, a Daily News investigation has found.
Though A Common Medical Procedure, Many Are Performed At Hospitals Unprepared If Something Goes Wrong
Under laws that took effect last year in Virginia and a few years earlier in the District and Maryland, hospitals must report to health regulators many serious injuries that patients suffer in the course of treatment.
The board charged with overseeing California's 350,000 registered nurses often takes years to act on complaints of egregious misconduct, leaving nurses accused of wrongdoing free to practice without restrictions, an investigation by The Times and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica found.
Our state needs to take an active and aggressive policy of mandatory public reporting and tracking of HAI. Kentucky should become a leader in health care, but if Kentucky always waits for the majority of other states to act, we will be relegated to being below average.
Important new information was added today to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Compare Web site that reports how frequently patients return to a hospital after being discharged, a possible indicator of how well the facility did the first time around.
Too many people die needlessly at U.S. hospitals, according to a sweeping new Medicare analysis showing wide variation in death rates between the best hospitals and the worst.
This increased transparency is one of the great hopes among health care reformers for tackling the high cost of American medicine.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil comments on reducing health care costs: "The president says he likes audacious goals. Here is one: ask medical providers to eliminate all hospital-acquired infections within two years."
The only economically feasible and, indeed, humane way to improve the system is to reduce the number of senseless and tragic medical errors in our hospitals. In its report, Public Citizen calls on Congress to put safety measures in place that would set the nation on course to meet the IOM’s goal of cutting the number of avoidable deaths in half in five years.
READ the report: http://www.citizen.org/documents/NPDB_Report_200907.pdf
Federal officials Thursday warned that about 5,700 surgery patients, including 1,000 at a Colorado Springs surgery center, are at risk of having been infected by an operating room technician with hepatitis C.
There were at least 89 serious medical errors last year in Utah hospitals and surgical centers, up 56 percent from the 57 logged in 2007, according to a Utah Department of Health report requested by The Salt Lake Tribune. These errors may include surgery on the wrong body part or leaving foreign objects like sponges in the body.
Public Citizen's report on ineffective hospital peer review (and under-reporting bad doctors to the National Practitioner Data Bank) made ABC World News on Sunday evening, June 21st. Doctors who perform medical errors are not always reported, and hospitals are not penalized for failing to report bad doctors.
NYT story about a Philadelphia VA hospital where many patients received botched cancer treatments.
On July 1, the state's hospitals will receive financial incentives based on the steps taken to prevent complications, including collapsed lungs and infections of the urinary tract and in the blood.
The VA started a nationwide safety campaign at it's 153 medical centers calling attention to potential infection risks from improperly operating and sterilizing the equipment.
Lori Nerbonne of New Hampshire Patient Voices writes in support of a bill for funding hospital infection rate reporting and an adverse event reporting bill, which will require hospitals to report serious, completely preventable errors to the state.
The hospital failed to notify the Department of Health that a patient had died and that at least seven others suffered serious harm last year as a result of mistakes by the medical staff.
Single-patient rooms are now viewed as an important element of high-quality health care.
Consumers Union Assesses Lack of Progress Ten Years After Institute of Medicine Found Up To 98,000 Die From Preventable Errors
The Consumers Union report said lawmakers largely have failed to enact patient safety reforms recommended by a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine that found that medical errors cost the U.S. as much as 29 billion U.S. dollars a year.
53% of orthopedic surgeons reported medical errors in the past 6 months!
Despite a landmark report a decade ago detailing the deadly nature of the U.S. health care system, a consumer group finds that little has been done to prevent errors that cost the nation $17 billion to $29 billion and kill as many as 100,000 patients annually.
Report Shows 10-Year Effort to Curb Medical Errors Yields Few Results
Despite a decade of promises, little has been done to fix the problem of preventable medical errors that kill nearly 98,000 people in the United States each year, a consumer group said on Tuesday.
The Massachusetts Public Health Council approved regulations to implement major patient safety reforms passed last year, including public reporting of hospital infections and serious medical errors, no-pay policies for certain preventable medical errors, and requiring every hospital in the state to have a Patient and Family Advisory Council and a rapid response system that can be activated by patients and their families.
Two annual government reports released Wednesday show that progress in improving the quality of health care and narrowing health disparities among ethnic groups remains agonizingly slow, and that patient safety may actually be declining.
Billing patients or their private insurance company for the cost of medical mistakes would change under a bill that's cleared the state Senate and is now before the Assembly. The bill would prevent hospitals from charging anyone for serious medical errors. The legislation would also require the state to make public individual hospitals' errors.
Electronic records might make medicine safer and cheaper. But it might just digitize the worst flaws of today's system, where errors are rampant and basic recommended treatments often fall through the cracks.
From February 2005 through December 2008, New Jersey hospitals reported 1,817 medical errors to the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services. Of that number, 251 resulted in deaths. But consumers have no way of knowing where these errors occurred; the law keeps hospital-specific information secret. A bill making its way through the legislature would lift that veil.
The state Senate today concurred unanimously with the House in passing tough new procedures to help prevent the spread of infections acquired in hospitals and other health facilities.
A couple whose day-old baby was given to the wrong mother to nurse in a hospital is demanding answers about how it happened.
New Jersey legislation would give public hospital-specific information on medical errors.
NH bill will require public reporting of adverse events.
A group of Ohio business leaders and 24 hospitals has launched what it hopes will become a statewide effort to reduce hospital medication errors and infections. Solutions for Patient Safety, as the effort is called, takes place as the state is preparing to publish hospital quality data, including some infection rates, on the Web for consumers.
The main topics of the conference were healthcare acquired infections, never events and healthcare transparency. Lisa McGiffert (Director of Stop Hospital Infections.org) is a featured speaker.
Issues surrounding hospital-acquired infections and other medical events "that should never happen" will highlight a health care conference in Lexington next week.
Legislators are considering passing a law requiring New Hampshire's 26 hospitals to publicly report their "never events" to the state.
Unlike 27 other states, New Hampshire does not require hospitals to report serious, preventable medical errors to the state, to the patient or to the family left behind if the patient dies as a result of the mistake.
And in another development, federal officials late last week approved a new company to begin inspections as part of its often criticized hospital accreditation program.
Medicare is right to stop paying hospitals for treating reasonably preventable medical errors
On Wednesday, Medicare will start applying that logic to American medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care.
New federal regulations target 11 hospital-acquired conditions that are considered reasonably preventable.
As the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services moves to deny Medicare payments for conditions caused by hospital mistakes, hospital executives here are watching private insurers in Tennessee and nationwide follow suit.
More than a third of New Jersey residents surveyed say they or a family member have been a victim of a medical error, and 90 percent would like the state to publicly report the number of errors at each hospital.
11 states waive fees for worst mistakes, but most will charge you or insurer
Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
CMS said that the new rules will not only improve the quality of care for Medicare benificiaries, but will save millions of taxpayer dollars every year.
HealthGrades shows rise in post-operative sepsis
Katie Couric interviews Dr. Donald Berwick about the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s campaign to reduce medical errors, including hospital infections.
New reports reveal pattern of deadly and expensive, yet preventable, medical errors.
A $21 million grant coming to South Carolina aims to improve patient care and prevent unnecessary hospital deaths.
A new report by HealthGrades concludes that as many as 950 preventable deaths occur each day from medical errors and other patient safety incidents, including hospital infections.
A new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that little progress has been made in the past five years to reduce deaths caused by medical errors in U.S. hospitals.
Report finds that most nurses and doctors witness medical errors, but few speak up when they see them. Requires a short registration.
When a report came out last week from a private group claiming that nearly 200,000 hospital patients die each year from preventable medical errors, it promptly sparked a fierce controversy.
Voluntary reporting systems to track and improve hospital error and infection rates don't work well. Only public disclosure and reporting laws passed in some states have been successful. "Americans concerned about their health care should urge their senators to kill the misnamed Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act," states the editorial.
The United States Senate is on the verge of approving legislation that could decrease the quality of hospital care in New York and elsewhere around the country. It needs to take a moment to be sure it doesn't. The Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act allows hospitals to shield medical error data from public scrutiny. It adopts a popular and plausible theory that holds that doctors will own up to mistakes, thereby improving the practice of medicine, if they feel they are not sacrificing their careers. But the bill may have other, more insidious effects, if critics such as Consumers Union are correct.
Learn about Maryland's efforts to alter its payment system for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
Learn about Minnesota's efforts to alter its payment system for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
Learn about Kansas efforts to alter its payment system for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
Learn about Missouri's efforts to alter its payment system for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
A new report on state and federal nonpayment policies for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
A new report on state and federal nonpayment policies for preventable hospital acquired conditions and events that harm patients.
The Nevada Hospital Association has a list of all sentinel events for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 by hospital type; sentinel event type and sentinel event outcome.
The Rhode Island Department of Health cites Rhode Island Hospital for surgical errors; the full deficiency report, indicating failure to follow standard safety procedures, and compliance order can be found at: http://www.health.ri.gov/discipline/hospitals/RhodeIsland200911.pdf
A report shows that PA hospitals had a significant decrease mortality rates associated with hospital readmissions compared to the previous year. Readmissions often are due to complications or infections – in this case, the cause of 22,094 of PA readmissions, which accounted for almost $1.1 billion in charges and 157,000 hospital days. The report found that readmissions for complication or infection comprise 38.2% of all readmissions in PA.
See if hospitals in your county have had administrative penalties issued by the California Department of Public Health.
Analysis on how to prevent “retained foreign objects” or “RFOs” from the PA Patient Safety Authority.
Has the U.S. made any progress on patient safety since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released To Err is Human in 1999?
Report date: August 25, 2008
A study of Medicare hospital records from 2003 and 2004 found that 1 in 5 patients was readmitted within 30 days, and half of non-surgical patients were rehospitalized without having seen an outpatient doctor in follow-up. In 2004 Medicare paid $17.4 billion to hospital for these readmissions. Readmissions are often avoidable and connected with problems in the hospital (like an infection) or with aftercare.
According to the CDC, the overall annual direct medical costs of hospital acquired infections to U.S. hospitals ranges from $28.4 to $33.8 billion.
Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General report on issues ranging from public and confidential reporting of adverse events, variations in estimates of adverse events, underreporting, measurements and nonpayment policyies for adverse events.
Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) website for Patient Safety Organizations. The concept of PSOs is to collect data on medical harm while shielding the information from the public in order to encourage reporting by hospitals and doctors. All information obtained by the PSO's is confidential and voluntary, which fails to inform consumers about how well their health care providers are doing on patient safety.
A comprehensive study issued today by the Office of the Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., found that many New York City hospitals substantially underreport “adverse events” to the New York State Department of Health (DOH).
This GAO study found that 15% of hospitalized Medicare beneficiaries in two selected counties experienced an adverse event during their hospital stay.
Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General Report
Department of Health and Human Services Office Of Inspecter General Report
The consequences of service deficiencies during off-hours include higher mortality and readmission rates, more surgical complications, and more medical errors. Given the health care industry's renewed focus on ensuring patient safety and providing high-quality medical care, why hasn't the situation changed at the "other hospital"?
Rules go into effect October 1, 2008.
Minnesota releases adverse events report released. The report identifies 27 different “medical errors” (such as operating on the wrong part of the body or wrong patient) and “adverse events” (such as patient falls, suicide, and abduction), it does not include hospital-acquired infections. A new bill filed in the MN legislature (HF 87) will require inclusion of hospital infections in the future.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) performed an analysis of suicidal behaviors in their paroxetine pediatric clinical trial database, and found that there was a statistically significant increase in suicide-related adverse events for paroxetine-treated subjects compared to placebo.
Voice4Patients.com has been designed to educate patients and consumers (potential users of the healthcare system) on the national epidemic of healthcare error. The site offers informative on-line resources for consumers; including an extensive list of disease specific organizations offering support and education for patients and their families, as well as resources that enable consumers to research medical conditions and browse on-line medical dictionaries. These resources are not a substitute for the expertise of trained clinicians.
Voice4Patients.Com
PO Box 273
Warren, ME. 04864
(207) 975-3475
www.voice4patients.com
voice4patients@aol.com
The Empowered Patient Coalition is a consumer and advocate-led effort to inform, engage and empower the public to assume a greater role in their own medical treatment and in becoming a driving force for meaningful health care reform.
The coalition was formed by advocates Helen Haskell and Julia Hallisy who share the same great loss of a child, similar patient safety goals and a clear vision of a health care system that is safe, effective, transparent and patient-centered.
Our goal is to partner with individuals, other advocates and consumer organizations to give the public a stronger voice in all health decisions. We strive to enable a new level of collaboration by facilitating the sharing of ideas and resources among all coalition members and participants and encourage the formation of powerful partnerships within the group that will lead to policy changes and quality health care for all.
http://www.empoweredpatientcoalition.org/home
Contact: info@EmpoweredPatientCoalition.org
Mission Statement:
The Maryland Coalition for Patients’ Rights is a grassroots alliance of parents, children, siblings, friends, patients and concerned citizens dedicated to promoting, protecting and preserving the civil rights of all patients. Through education, public awareness and political action, CPR is fighting to preserve the right to safe, honest and professional healthcare for all Marylanders and, in cases of injury suffered as a result of negligence and mal-practice, the right to legal redress and fair and just compensation.
http://www.coalitionforpatientsrights.org/
The Consumer Health Quality Council (a coalition of Health Care for All) empowers those impacted by health care quality issues to have a voice in our health care system, to engage fellow consumers to be active partners in their health care, and to advocate for high quality, safe, and accessible health care for all Massachusetts residents.
http://hcfa.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageId=546&grandparentID=531&parentID=544
Mothers Against Medical Error (MAME) is a South Carolina-based group that works with medical error victims, healthcare professionals, and legislators to promote its mission of providing support to victims of medical harm; educating policymakers and the public about patient safety issues; and advocating for improvements in healthcare policy. Areas in which MAME has been active include medical education reform, hospital infection reporting, in-hospital patient support systems, and disclosure of medical error.
Contact: Helen Haskell mamemoms@gmail.com
http://www.mamemomsonline.org/
The Empowered Patient
595 Buckingham Way # 305
San Francisco, CA 94132
Contact: Dr. Julia Hallisy
Hallisy@TheEmpoweredPatient.com
(415) 681-1011
Our goal is to help empowered patients claim their right to safe, effective health care. Patients are beginning to grasp the importance of taking a proactive role in their health care and are coming to the realization that they are a powerful, yet untapped safety resource.
Our mission is to raise public awareness about patient safety issues including adverse events, medication errors, hospital-acquired infections and communication challenges. Help us stand and bear witness to the fact that we can and must do more to keep patients safe.
http://www.TheEmpoweredPatient.com/NH Patient Voices
6 Fieldstone Drive
Bow, NH 03304
contact: Lori Nerbonne
nhpatientvoices@comcast.net
603-491-4563
(website under construction)
Mission: To advocate for urgent improvements in patient safety and in gaining access to hospital quality data that will allow NH health care consumers to make informed decisions when selecting hospitals and treatment providers. We also raise awareness for and educate healthcare consumers about patient safety, infection & error prevention, and patients' rights.
CT Center for Patient Safety works in our communities, within our healthcare systems, and with elected officials to improve the quality of healthcare and to protect the rights of injured patients through education, accountability and advocacy. We believe that quality healthcare is a right.
read and watch what the Cleveland clinic does to their patients
http://www.kidneytransplantkiller.com
We shouldn't pay hospitals to treat us for preventable infections we got from the hospital stay itself. And hospitals should report their infection rates so people can compare and pick the best, safest hospital for surgery, childbirth or illness.
These kind of common sense changes have already been tested in many states and they work! Now its time--past time really--to extend these safety incentives to every hospital in every community.
Urge your House and Senate lawmakers member to pass these common sense changes.
More than 290,000 surgical site infections occur in U.S. hospitals each year. Patients who acquire infections from surgery spend, on average, an additional 6.5 days in the hospital, are five times more likely to be readmitted after discharge, and twice as likely to die.
Surgery patients are at risk for infection because surgical incisions create a pathway for germs to enter the body. Maintaining a sterile environment in the operating room is therefore critical to protect patients from being contaminated with bacteria, which can lead to infection.
How well is your hospital, state and the nation as a whole are performing on three key practices that help prevent infections during surgery? Find out here »
The surgeon was not prepared for my sedative needs, did not listen to my request of what to give me, and because I was holding up the Endoscopic Unit, he called for an anesthesiologist I had never met. He never asked a single question, nor did he check out my charts. He simply injected me with Propofol, without the Lidocaine to ease the pain. I was in hell, and then out for a quick intubation. As a heart patient with all the symptoms from that, I should not have had Propofol. I woke up coughing my guts and lungs up as they extubated me. I was on the other side of the hospital in the main recovery area. Neither doctor came to tell me what happened and what might happen later. Read More »
I was involved in a motor vehicle accident. I arrived at the hospital alert but with a dislocated hip and a fractured ankle. At the time of treatment I was told they needed x-rays and I would be getting something for pain.
Read More »
In January 2007 I underwent cabx5, an aneurysm repair in left ventricle of my heart, where a bi-ventricular pacemaker was inserted. According to my medical records, my doctor found the aneurysm in the left ventricle in 2004, and in 2005 in the stress test, and never told me about it. I am permanently disabled. Read More »
Helen Haskell, founder of Mothers Against Medical Error (MAME), was another key advocate for the Stop Hospital Infection Campaign in South Carolina where she worked with a coalition of other activists (individuals with hospital infection experiences) and organizations (John Ruoff, SC Fair Share; Theresa Arnold, SC AARP; and other) to get the hospital infection public disclosure bill passed into law.
Read More »
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