Noticias

Noticias

  • Título: Curbing Hospital/Medical Errors and Unnecessary Procedures: A Call to Action
  • Fecha: 29-06-2015
  • Dr. Frank Criado

    In a provocative recent article published in the Wall Street Journal ('How to Stop Hospitals from Killing Us'), Dr. Marty Makary (a surgeon at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore) brought to our attention the huge and largely unresolved problem of hospital errors and unnecessary medications and procedures. Here are the three opening paragraphs:

    “When there is a plane crash in the U.S., even a minor one, it makes headlines. There is a thorough federal investigation, and the tragedy often yields important lessons for the aviation industry. Pilots and airlines thus learn how to do their jobs more safely.

    The world of American medicine is far deadlier: medical mistakes kill enough people each week to fill four jumbo jets. But these mistakes go largely unnoticed by the world at large, and the medical community rarely learns from them. The same preventable mistakes are made over and over again, and patients are left in the dark about which hospitals have significantly better (or worse) safety records than their peers.

    As doctors, we swear to do no harm. But on the job we soon absorb another unspoken rule: to overlook the mistakes of our colleagues. The problem is vast. U.S. surgeons operate on the wrong body part as often as 40 times a week. Roughly a quarter of all hospitalized patients will be harmed by a medical error of some kind. If medical errors were a disease, they would be the sixth leading cause of death in America-just behind accidents and ahead of Alzheimer's. The human toll aside, medical errors cost the U.S. health-care system tens of billions a year. Some 20% to 30% of all medications, tests and procedures are unnecessary, according to research done by medical specialists, surveying their own fields. What other industry misses the mark this often?”

    It is self-evident this is a huge problem, and I find it refreshing to see Dr. Makary’s article (and recent book) and the many other voices beginning to be raised loudly and clearly. We must become proactive and position ourselves on the right side of these issues, or else the solutions will – almost inevitably – be forced upon us.

    It would be hard to disagree with the notion that changing the “disturbing closed-door culture of American medicine” should be a prime target, injecting transparency and accountability every step along the way. In one word: we absolutely must change the prevailing hospital culture. Some efforts are already underway, and they can be expected to elicit opposition and antagonism. Let’s hope the forces of transformation will prevail in the end.


  • Fuente: endovascular.es