California hospitals begin reporting ‘adverse events’

LOS ANGELES—California hospitals reported that during a 10-month period ending in May, doctors performed the wrong surgical procedure, operated on the wrong body part or on the wrong patient 41 times, records show.
During the same period, hospitals reported that foreign objects were left in surgical patients 145 times.
These types of errors, officially called “adverse events,” are among the 1,002 cases of serious medical harm to patients disclosed by hospitals statewide, according to figures compiled by the California Department of Public Health. Under a new state law, hospitals must report to health officials all substantial injuries to their patients.
There are 28 types of dangerous mistakes that must be reported to state regulators, including medication errors and suicide attempts.
Beth Capell, a lobbyist for consumer advocacy group Health Access California, called the number of instances of these preventable events “a wake-up call to everyone about the safety of California hospitals.”
But Dr. Angela Scioscia, senior medical director of the UC San Diego Medical Center, said hospitals “are becoming safer and safer all the time.”
The public reporting requirement, Scioscia said, “is a great opportunity to make rapid improvements” because facilities can learn from one another’s mistakes.
The health department has levied $25,000 fines against 10 hospitals that reported adverse events so far.
The state has until 2015 to begin posting the self-reported incidents online.

I love the line ‘Hospitals are becoming safer and safer all the time.’ Makes me feel all gooey inside.

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An Assassination

Well, almost.

It will be years before we see the last of those “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper stickers. The slogan has become an article of faith of the Left, an din recent years Democrats on the Senate Intelligence committee have conducted investigation after investigation in order to prove it. Now we have their final report, covering statements mad by administration officials in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller claims it shows the administration ‘repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent.’  But wait.

Even a cursory look at the report shows that in a number of areas, including the critical subject of Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities, the administration’s statements were, in the report’s words, ‘substantiated by intelligence information.’

So after all that effort, Democrats came up with nothing.

Not that they didn’t try. Among other things, the majority cut committee Republicans out of the investigation and refused to include the many statements by Democrats who also believed Saddam Hussein had WMD.

‘It’s ironic that the Democrats would knowingly distort and misrepresent the committee’s findings and the intelligence,’ committee vice-chairman Kit Bond said, ‘in an effort to prove that the administration distorted and mischaracterized the intelligence.’

It’s also ironic that you will probably only find this story here.  MorganLighter

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