Table of Contents
< Truth / Justice / Patient
Safety >
It's a path
I'm reorganizing this site. It does not have a linear
progression anymore.
The best way to proceed might be to click below on topics that interest you.
Home Page
- Patients need institutional support
Synopsis - an attempt to summarize the site in a linear read
Home Page Addendum
Patient Safety
Silence versus safety - trends in patient safety
Silenced -
the community thinks in stories
White wall of silence - a matter of
culture and written public policy
Silencing
patient advocates in healthcare
Conflict of Interest -
the unacknowledged elephant in the room
Psychology
of Healthcare Professionals
Blacklisting Patients
Graph
Nurse survey - frequency of reporting
Nurse training - another reason they don't
report
Loyalty - why no one in medicine ever will report
Mobbing and bullying - the community punishes reporting
/ Trust us /
Defensive documentation
- protects medical personnel, not patients
Risk management - are patients the enemy?
SOAP -
guide for what physicians are supposed to record
Management Issues -
enforced institutional ignorance
XXXXXX hospitals - historical source for culture of silence, (had to
delete it because of backlash)
Crime in medicine -
Sexual Abuse - no structures protect patients
from miscreants in medicine
Liability Limitations - making targets
out of a class of patients
Freedom of Speech for Patients - Patients should be as protected as physicians.
Exploitation - It's not on the map.
OSMB - Ohio State Medical Board
Disciplinary Action Chart for 2001
Disciplinary Action Codes
Citizen oversight group - doctors cannot
police doctors
Oversight - doctors want outside oversight for those who provide to them
OSMB Investigators
National Practitioner Data Bank
mammography - why the government cannot make
medicine safer
solutions
medical
errors
one number - reporting needs to be encouraged
HHS Hospital Compare - It's good to see more of this happening.
Josie King Foundation - The problem for most patient safety initiatives.
Examples - Murder is a bellwether. Murders committed by hospital staff are said to be the easiest kind of serial killing to get away with. The same conditions that allow those crimes enable thousands of other errors and sins.
Dr. Benjamin Rush - Founding Father. Famous physician. Centuries of silence.
Dr. Allan Zarkin - Doctors are humans. They do bad
things.
Dr. Liana Gedz - A victim testifies before Congress.
Dr. James Burt - The system removes normal inhibitors.
Dr.Arthur Richard Schramm - No one
checks even when there are red flags
Dr. Graeme Reeves - victims
stonewalled by health authorities and laughed at by police.
Dr. Vikas Kashyap - same old, same
old.
Dr. Michael Swango - Even murderers are protected in
medicine.
Donald Harvey - Sometimes they are orderlies or nurses aides.
Orville Lynn Majors - A lack of moderation can get noticed.
Charles Cullen, RN - The system lacks a way to spread the word.
Dr. Gary Malakoff - An M.D. is a get-out-off-jail-free card.
Dr. David C Arndt - Surprised anyone would be upset.
Richard W. Gibson - Stealing patient's identity.
Genene Jones, LVN - What does a serial killer look like?
Dr. Harold Shipman - What to learn from the world's most prolific serial killer.
Catherine Wood and Gwen Graham - Nurses' "Murder
Game."
Dr. Michael E. Sachs - An example of how helpless patients are to find out about their healthcare.
Dr. Federico Castro-Moure - Another glimmer of how much power and protection doctors are used to.
Other examples on which you might want to do searches:
Beverley Allitt - Britain. At least 4 murders.
Richard Angelo - Long Island, New York, at least 10 murders
Robert Diaz - Riverside, California, 12 murders
Kristen Gilbert -
Massachusetts. "If my
patient dies, can I get off work early?" 350 murders possible.
Terri Rachals - Albany, Georgia. 23-year old intensive care nurse. 6 counts of murder.
Brian Rosenfeld - Florida, 23 possible murders
Jane Toppan - Massachusetts, at least 31 murders
Efren Saldivar - California, at least 6 murders
Sigmund Freud - Recent research
shows he put personal interest in front of wellbeing of patients.
To whom to complain?
The Back Surgeon - fiction sometimes is the best way to make problems understandable
Medical Complaints Homepage - How and to whom to
complain in medicine (it isn't easy or effective).
Medical Information
Release Form
List of State Medical
Boards
Complaint form
Miscellaneous
It's a path - we must be allowed to know
what's true
Chalk Outline - "Save the
Patients" symbol
One of the many things they won't let you read
Open letter to Daniel Shore
Universal Insurance -
Concerns about government involvement in managing healthcare.
Links to other sites, many of which were set up by victims of specific problems in medicine. Many of the most important and most progressive institutions in the world were set up in the same way, as responses to specific and horrible abuses. The Magna Charta was a social revolution against the specific abuses of a specific tyrant. It was the insistence that steps be taken to end such abuses. The bulk of the Declaration of Independence is a recounting of the abuses of George III and a declaration of the institutions that would be established to correct those abuses. Many of these web sites are no different.
On this site, the point of discussing crime in medicine is to shed light on patient safety problems. The conflicts of interest of providers is the fundamental problem. Criminal law is the first step for addressing that, but the systems, culture, mindsets and habits protect even crime in medicine. As long as that is the case, there is no hope for progress on the biggest issues. If I were to relate in detail an instance of sex abuse and violence in a hospital and how depraved the caregivers were and how they got away with it, it would be to shed light. The perpetrators in this instance are church-goers with children. They are respected members of their community (who in medicine isn't?), but have passions that destroy people's lives - something they can get away with because of where they work. What they do afterwards to silence their victims is the most despicable of all. How this works is important to know. We hear the statistics on how much assault, rape and homicide there is in medicine. What we don't hear is why virtually no one is reported, let alone indicted for those crimes, why the criminals are allowed to keep committing crimes, and why we so rarely hear from the victims. If you can shed light on that, you have a duty to. When you are a victim, it is because no previous victim shed that light to protect you. For all of the errors and neglects causing the 195,000 unnecessary deaths each year, and many times more unnecessary injuries, the beginning of the solution is getting a handle on the intentional ones.
"Medicine hates its victims."
If that doesn't ring true in the center of your heart
your knowledge of patient safety is only theoretical.
If you flat out don't believe it, you probably work in medicine.