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New State Law Requires Disclosure of Medical Errors
Posted by: Michael A. Kelly
July 14, 2008
Topic: Medical Malpractice
According to a copyrighted story in the June 30, 2008 Los Angeles Times, serious patient injuries occurring in hospitals are being disclosed as a result of a new state law. 1,002 cases of serious medical harm were disclosed by California hospitals between July 2007 and May of this year under a state law requiring hospitals to inform health regulators of major injuries to their patients.
Some examples: in October 2007, a technician at the children's hospital at Stanford University improperly connected a ventilator hose thereby pumping too little oxygen into a 9-day-old infant's lungs; technicians at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz unintentionally placed a CT scan of one patient into the electronic file of another, leading physicians to remove the wrong person’s appendix; at UC San Diego Medical Center, a patient died after a nurse incorrectly programmed a medicine pump that then delivered more than twice the appropriate dose of a specialized blood pressure drug. State investigators found that the hospital had been warned earlier by its own safety committee that "errors continue to occur" with that type of pump but had not taken corrective action.
Under the 2006 disclosure law, hospitals must inform state regulators of every occurrence of 28 different types of dangerous mistakes. Those include deaths during labor, medication errors, suicide attempts and sexual assaults.
The public health department has until 2015 to begin posting the information on the Internet. The most recent figures available cover the 10 months since July 2007. In that time, 466 patients developed bedsores so severe that necrosis to the muscle or bone was present.
Another 145 patients had foreign objects left in their bodies. Thirty-four died while under anesthesia. 41 times doctors performed the wrong procedure, or operated on the wrong body part, or on the wrong patient.
At Kaiser Foundation Hospital San Jose in March, staffers left a patient waiting in the emergency room for more than an hour after a test showed that his blood sugar was higher than the maximum permissable amount. He passed out in the waiting room and died from heart failure.
Dr. Donald Berwick, the president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement says the number of mistakes is certainly much higher than what California hospitals have disclosed. His institute has estimated that as many as 15 million patients nationwide are harmed each year in hospitals.
