Hospitals: They Can Kill You

I am on a plane as I write this, returning from a meeting about patient safety. I'm involved with a number of organizations that deal with this topic. Sometimes the meetings are a bit esoteric and include discussions that are somewhat too clinical for my non-medical brain to follow. But at other times we discuss issues that shouldn't be issues at all - for example the fact that medical personnel don't always wash their hands before they touch a patient. This one simple fact, the lack of hand washing or improper hand washing, accounts for one half - to three-quarters of all hospital-acquired infections, and historically compliance with hand-washing protocols are only followed 60 percent of the time.

Some of the people that attend these meetings are doctors, nurses, researchers and hospital CEOs. Some are people, who are not official members of the healthcare world at all, but who have learned a great deal about the practice of medicine because they, or a close family member, have personally been the victim of medical error.

Medical error - it sounds like such a whitewashed term, a cover up for the horrors that these families have endured: An infant with jaundice who ended up with brain damage because doctors wouldn't believe his first-time mom when she insisted there was something else at work that was not being addressed; a man who died from spinal cancer because a malignant lab test was never reported and therefore the tumor was not treated; and a newborn who was subjected to unnecessary open-heart surgery without his parents' knowledge or consent and died when a simple angioplasty would have saved his life.

The more stories I hear, the more I learn about the denial and cover-ups that, more often than not, are the medical community's response to something going wrong. The more I learn, the angrier I get. Every family I have spoken to wants the same thing - they want to make sure that no other family goes through what they have. They don't want to go to court to find out what happened and why. They do want an apology and to understand what went wrong, and yes they want compensation to pay for expenses and the impact on their lives that the error caused. They are driven to turn to the courts because the medical profession protects its own, turns its back on problems they know about and won't be forthright or even say "I'm sorry".

So the next time you or a loved one has to go to the hospital - don't take anything for granted. Ask questions. Insist on answers. Make sure everyone who touches you first washes their hands. Be polite, but don't be quiet. Speak up for your rights and know that bad things can happen, even when everyone is working with the best of intentions.