Re: Medical 'mistakes' vs. 'administrations'

[Al Tschaeche <antatnsu@pacbell.net>]

The Business Roundtable presented a statement to the Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions as reported on http://www.brtable.org/document.cfm/372
that states, in part: "Allowing for retirees in BRT-sponsored health plans,
the error frequencies reported by the IOM imply that every hour, one of
our BRT member company enrollees suffers and avoidable death and five suffer
an avoidable disability due to hospital errors."  Given 24 hrs/day,
365 days/yr, that's 8760 deaths/year and 43,800 disabilities.  There
is a problem in hospitals that needs fixing.  I can't believe may
of the deaths are due to nuclear procedures, but I know there are a few.

The question is, should the government require hospitals to report such deaths and disabilities to a government agency (who, supposedly would do something to stop them), or should there continue to be a voluntary system of some kind?  Clearly the voluntary system doesn't work, but could it me made to?  There are a lot of private quality assurance organizations that hospitals belong to that audit hospitals for quality.  Apparently that system doesn't work either.  So, maybe, we need a Hospital Regulatory Commission (HRC) that operates like the NRC with licensing and fines and inspections and regulatory guides, etc. to get the deaths and disabilities down.  Seems only fair since the NRC obviously works.  We haven't killed any member of the public in the US from things nuclear.  Hospitals and nursing homes can't say that.  Al Tschaeche antatnsu@pacbell.net

Jim Muckerheide wrote:

Radsafers,

Consider the following report in today's New York Times in light of our
policies and the past discussions of the trivial matters and consequences of
nuclear medicine medical misadministrations.
 
 

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