Anyone who has spent time in a hospital-as a patient, visitor, family member or medical professional-knows that they can be noisy, frantic places. Contributing to the cacophony is what’s known as “alarm fatigue,” or the deadening effect on medical personnel of the myriad sounds issuing from monitoring devices, particularly in critical care units. We first….
Continue ReadingArchives for November 2012
Why Do So Many Hospitals Lose Power During a Weather Crisis?
Among the casualties of superstorm Sandy’s massive destruction was the security people feel about the safety of being hospitalized. As described by public interest advocate ProPublica, “It is a hospital’s nightmare: The power goes out and backup generators don’t kick in, leaving critically ill patients without the mechanical help they need to breathe.” Hospital generators….
Continue ReadingCongress Will Consider Greater Oversight of Compounding Pharmacies
From the meningitis outbreak, something good may come out of something bad. Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts introduced a bill in Congress to boost the federal government’s authority to regulate compounding pharmacies. As we’ve been reporting in the last several weeks (most recently last week), compounding pharmacies have been able….
Continue ReadingPhotojournalist Captures the Essence of Nursing in America
Nurses are the backbone of the healing arts. Photographer/filmmaker Carolyn Jones’ new book, “The American Nurse Project,” celebrates their singular role in caring for patients and keeping them safe. Traveling throughout the U.S. to memorialize the personal tales of 75 nurses, Jones articulates what everybody knows but sometimes struggles to express about going to work….
Continue ReadingPrescription Drugs and Dietary Supplements Can Make an Unhappy Marriage
As many people know, grapefruit is a delicious and healthful fruit that can be very bad medicine when consumed with certain drugs. One of its chemical constituents, furanocoumarin, interacts with a variety of drugs that can enhance or diminish their effects. Among the more common drugs not to be consumed with grapefruit are those taken….
Continue ReadingWhy Compounding Pharmacies Often Don’t Pay for Their Mistakes
As the death toll continues to rise from the meningitis outbreak after a compounding pharmacy distributed contaminated medicine a few months ago, how these facilities operate has come under increased scrutiny. A story published last week in USA Today detailed how compounding pharmacies escape regulatory punishment and end up paying for their mistakes only through….
Continue ReadingScary Numbers and Sobering Questions about Diagnostic Errors
In an insightful piece published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), three physicians ponder why errors in diagnosis are not represented in efforts to improve the quality of medical care and, ultimately, patient safety. According to the authors, 40,000-80,000 people die every year from diagnostic errors; those are defined as mistakes….
Continue ReadingSurgery Decisions Shouldn’t Be Larded With Conflicts of Interest
The health and medicine watchdog HealthNewsReview.org recently laid bare how regulatory absence can poison what’s supposed to be an objective, scientific analysis of the suitability of a surgical procedure. In excerpting an article that has been accepted for future publication in Arthritis Care & Research, HealthNewsReview shows the wide cracks in how the FDA approves….
Continue ReadingFreedom and the “Right to Die”
Today, I offer some very personal musings about how we treat disabled people in our laws. One recurring theme in this patient safety blog is to promote self-determination for patients as the best guide through a tortuous, mistake-prone medical care system. If you learn enough about your own condition, that will help you get the….
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