Hospitals in South Florida and across the country reexamine approach in hospital errors
Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the new approach that hospitals across the country, including in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, are taking to avert errors. Such errors are all too common according to the Miami medical malpractice attorneys of Gamba & Lombana.
Statistics provided by the Food and Drug Administration reveal that "errors made by doctors, nurses and other medical caregivers cause 44,000 to 98,000 deaths a year. Hospital infections, take another 100,000 lives. And mistakes involving medications injure 1.3 million patients annually in the United States."
With the help from the National Quality Forum (a government-advisory body that sets safety standards for hospitals), some hospitals are beginning to rethink the way they manage nurses and doctors who have made unintentional errors. Instead of treating them like criminals, they are handling them more like traumatized patients who require care - and then involving them in the administration's investigation of what went wrong. The reasoning is that a hospital can learn from a staffer's mistake so that the same error does not happen again.
Four years ago, a nurse mistook a bag of epidural painkiller for penicillin and hooked it up to an IV line that pumped the painkiller into the bloodstream of a 16-year-old mother-to-be as she was giving birth. The patient died and the nurse was fired. The nurse later faced criminal charges brought on by the state. A study of this case, led by researchers from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, revealed that system flaws at the hospital may have contributed to the nurse's mistake. Criminal charges against the nurse were later amended to two misdemeanor counts after a plea agreement.
The WSJ article found that hospital administrators are looking for ways to address risky behavior of health care practitioners before it leads to serious consequences for patients.
