Notes 10

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.”

 

 

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http://qshc.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/11/1/57

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Home | Table of Contents | It's a Path
Silence versus Patient Safety
Loyalty versus Patient Safety
The White Wall of Silence versus Patient Safety
Blacklisting Patients
Freedom of Speech for Patients
Medical Complaints - How to

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It's a path

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