25 Operations Performed on the Wrong Patient, and Other Links
25 operations performed on the wrong-patient and 107 on the wrong part of the body, between January 2002 and June 2008. 43 patients significantly harmed and one died.
Scientist: Anti-smoking groups claims are hogwash: Children aren’t harmed by merely touching the clothing of a smoker.
An American charity pays British drug users to become sterilized. First acceptor says “I should never be a father.” (HT to Tyler Cowen)
Paying people to be sterilized is an interesting idea. I would bet that we have barely scratched the surface on the possibilities.
The operations described are called “never events.” So-called because they should never happen.
Am I correct in assuming that the only way a never event can happen is if the surgeon (indeed, every one on the surgical team) has never met the patient or talked to him/her?
These event would seem to be the product of impersonal medicine. Yet the solutions offered most often are to make medicine even more impersonal.
Joe, I think you are absolutely right. A doctor who operates on the wrong patient is almost by definition a doctor who doesn’t know the patient.
All these errors are because the doctor didn’t know the patient. The problem with the electronic medical records crowd is that they don’t think the personal side of medicine is important.
What they miss is that an EMR can be wrong. And if it is wrong, the errors can be just as bad as they have been in the past.
Bruce has a good point. If there are social (external) costs of some people’s having children then it makes sense to try to reduce those costs by buying them off.
These error rates are from 27,370 physician self-reports. The article abstract provides no information on how may procedures were performed in the 6 year period.
It says that “strict adherence to the universal protocol must be expanded to nonsurgical specialties to promote a zero-tolerence philosophy…”
It does not say whether the authors discuss how these error rates compare with error rates in other dangerous professions. It does not place the error rates in context–have they gone up or down in the last 40 years. Has the Universal Protocol changed the trend? It does not say how these error rates compare to medical systems in other countries. Are the errors cited evenly distributed across all types of hospitals or surgical practices or are they more likely to happen in particular types of organizations? Did one physician or hospital account for a large fraction of the errors reported?
Presumably the full paper deals with these questions. Otherwise, these results would come across as a fairly superficial numbers piece in favor of a particular regulatory agenda.
Count on Linda’s ever watchful eye. I love it.
Sterilization: It’s a good idea. We’ll be paying for the drug addict’s health care. We’ll be paying for their children (welfare and child programs). I don’t know why we shouldn’t encourage someone living off the system to avoid having children they can’t support.
What people are afraid of is not that a drug addict won’t be able to have kids. It’s that a drug addict might get clean and suddenly decide to have children, only to realize that they were “coerced” into being sterlized because they needed the money for a fix. I think that it’s a real problem, but I don’t know if it’s the tragedy that we think it is.