These are notes linked to from other pages on this site
“You always start with an ideology. All evil begins with a
big ideology,” Philip G. Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford
University, said at the University of Delaware in a lecture titled “The Lucifer
Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.”
Pushing the profession: how the news media turned patient
safety into a priority
by M L Millenson, Visiting Scholar
Institute for Health Services Research and Policy Studies, Northwestern
University, Evanston, Illinois, USA
Correspondence to:
M L Millenson, 2735 Fort Sheridan Avenue, Highland Park, IL 60035, USA;
m-millenson@northwestern.edu
Accepted for publication 7 January 2002
The problem of patient safety has been repeatedly identified
in the medical literature since the mid 1950s, but regular revelations about
patient deaths and injuries resulting from treatment have had almost no effect
on the actual practice of medicine Millenson ML. Demanding medical excellence: Doctors and accountability in the
information age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997: 52–73.
references:
Millenson ML. Demanding medical excellence: Doctors and accountability in the
information age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997: 52–73.
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Whether healthcare is regarded as a commodity or as a
fundamental human right, patients deserve to be protected from
abuse within it.
More effort is made to protect physicians from
liability than to protect patients from abuse. And freedom from liability creates
more abuse.
JCAHO, pronounced Jayco http://www.jointcommission.org/
They say that their mission is: "To continuously improve the safety and quality
of care provided to the public through the provision of healthcare
accreditation and related services that support performance improvement in
healthcare organizations." Unfortunately the board of directors of JCAHO is
dominated by representatives of the American Medical Association and the
American Hospital Association, which raises concerns about conflicts of interest
and the extent to which it can have a perspective that is objective and honest
enough to do what must be done to improve safety and quality.
The Joint Commission evaluates and accredits nearly 15,000 healthcare
organizations and programs in the United States. Operating since 1951, it is an independent, not-for-profit
organization and is the nation’s predominant standards-setting
and accrediting body in healthcare.
However, according to The Massachusettes Nurses Association News at
http://www.massnurses.org/news/2004/10/JCAHOhtm.htm,
critics say that it is more lapdog than watchdog. In that article, Karen
Higgins, RN says, "The hospitals are given notice of pending surveys, and they
spend months preparing to get ready. Staffing always improves around the time of
a JCAHO visit, and it goes right back to normal (usually bad) immediately after."
Based on a survey of 500 hospitals inspected by JCAHO between 2000 and 2002, the
report found that the organization failed to identify 167 of the 241
deficiencies state inspectors later found at the facilities, or 69 percent of
the total.
During the entire tenure of JCAHO there have been regular
revelations about the amount of unnecessary death and injury in medicine with no
overall improvement in those numbers and almost no changes in the way medicine
is practiced.
Two Comedians
The two comedians were Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla on The Man Show, a
half hour comedy television show on Comedy Central. The sketch is one of their
more famous ones.
Other Humor:
According to the U.S. Dept of Health & Human Services there are 700,000
physicians in the USA and at least 120,000 unnecessary deaths caused in medicine
each year. That is .171 deaths per physician.
The number of people in the USA who own guns is 80,000,000. The number of
accidental gun deaths each year is 1,500. That's .000188 deaths per gun owner.
Statistically doctors are 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.
Guns don't kill people. Doctors do.
Unnecessary patient
deaths
An average of 195,000 people in the USA died due to potentially preventable,
in-hospital medical errors in each of the years 2000, 2001 and 2002 according to
HealthGrades, the healthcare quality company. HealthGrades looked at 37 million
patient records taken from three years of Medicare data in all 50 states and
D.C., approximately 45 percent of all hospital admissions (excluding obstetric
patients) in the U.S. from 2000 to 2002.
The HealthGrades study finds nearly double the number of
deaths from medical errors found by the 1999 IOM report "To Err is Human." The
IOM study extrapolated national findings based on data from just three states.
For comparison, 58,000 Americans died during the 30 years
that Americans fought in Vietnam.
If you want to say something about any of my
sites, my phone number is on almost every page. So is my
email address. There even
are Feedback Forms where you can communicate
anonymously. I am listening. I will be sensitive to what you say.