http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/14/opinion/14mccaughey.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

 

November 14, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

To Catch a Deadly Germ

By BETSY McCAUGHEY

WHAT kills more than five times as many Americans as AIDS? Hospital infections, which account for an estimated 100,000 deaths every year.

Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are calling for voluntary blood testing of all patients to stem the spread of AIDS, have chosen not to recommend a test that is essential to stop the spread of another killer sweeping through our nation’s hospitals: M.R.S.A., or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The C.D.C. guidelines to prevent hospital infections, released last month, conspicuously omit universal testing of patients for M.R.S.A.

That’s unfortunate. Research shows that the only way to prevent M.R.S.A. infections is to identify which patients bring the bacteria into the hospital. The M.R.S.A. test costs no more than the H.I.V. test and is less invasive, a simple nasal or skin swab.

Staph bacteria are the most prevalent infection-causing germs in most hospitals, and increasingly these infections cannot be cured with ordinary antibiotics. Sixty percent of staph infections are now drug resistant (that is, M.R.S.A.), up from 2 percent in 1974.

Some people carry M.R.S.A. germs in their noses or on their skin without realizing it. The bacteria do not cause infection unless they get inside the body — usually via a catheter, a ventilator, or an incision or other open wound. Once admitted to a hospital, these patients shed the germs on bedrails, wheelchairs, stethoscopes and other surfaces, where M.R.S.A. can live for many hours.

Doctors and other caregivers who lean over an M.R.S.A.-positive patient often pick up the germ on their hands, gloves or lab coats and carry it along to their next patient.

The blood-pressure cuffs that nurses wrap around patients’ bare arms frequently carry live bacteria, including M.R.S.A. In a recent study at a French teaching hospital, 77 percent of blood-pressure cuffs wheeled from room to room were contaminated. Another study linked contaminated blood-pressure cuffs to several infected infants in the nursery at the University of Iowa hospital.

Among developed nations, the United States has one of the worst records of curbing drug-resistant infections, according to the Sentry Antimicrobial Surveillance Program, an international effort to monitor drug-resistant germs. In this country, M.R.S.A. hospital infections increased 32-fold from 1976 to 2003, according to the C.D.C.

In the 1980s, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands faced similarly soaring rates of M.R.S.A., but nearly eradicated it. How? By screening patients and requiring health care workers treating patients with M.R.S.A. to wear gowns and gloves and use dedicated equipment to prevent the spread. The Dutch called their strategy “search and destroy.”

A growing number of hospitals in the United States have proved that such precautions work here, too. Recently, a pilot program using screening at Presbyterian University Hospital, in Pittsburgh, reduced M.R.S.A. infections by 90 percent. At a Yale-affiliated hospital in New Haven, screening reduced M.R.S.A. infections in intensive care by two-thirds.

And a recently completed nine-year study at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, found that screening led to a 75 percent drop in M.R.S.A. bloodstream infections among intensive-care patients and a 67 percent decline throughout the hospital. Earlier efforts to stop these infections by installing many more dispensers of hand cleanser and conducting a yearlong educational campaign on hand hygiene had no effect.

Some public health advocates recommend screening only “high-risk” patients — those who recently have been hospitalized, live in nursing homes or have kidney disease. Partial screening is somewhat effective, but universal screening prevents the most infections.

Can hospitals afford to screen for M.R.S.A.? They cannot afford not to. Infections wipe out hospital profits. When a patient develops an infection and has to spend many additional weeks hospitalized, Medicare does not pay for most of that additional care.

Treating hospital infections costs an estimated $30.5 billion a year in the United States. Prevention, on the other hand, is inexpensive and requires no capital outlays. A pilot program at the University of Pittsburgh found that screening tests, gowns and other precautions cost only $35,000 a year, and saved more than $800,000 a year in infection costs. A review of similar cost analyses, published in The Lancet in September, concluded that M.R.S.A. screening increases hospital profits — as it saves lives.

Yet, for a decade, the C.D.C. has rebuffed calls for screening, most recently from a committee of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiologists of America. C.D.C. officials claim that more research is needed to prove the benefits of screening. More research cannot hurt, but we know enough already to move ahead.

Some hospitals are leading the way, including Evanston Northwestern, in Illinois; the Veterans Affairs medical centers; New England Baptist Hospital, in Boston; and Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore.

The C.D.C.’s lax guidelines give many other hospitals an excuse to do too little. Every year of delay costs thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, is the founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

Mom seeks help for daughter stricken with mystery illness

By JAMES AMOS
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

Dear Friends. I was able to attend the press conference and
demonstration by 15 persons and the Clarkes. Johns Hopkins knew we
were there. There was security everywhere.

Joan addressed a small crowd on public property in front of Johns
Hopkins Hospital entrance on Wolfe Street in Baltimore. Two TV
cameras were grinding and a few press photographers were
present. Due to the activity on the street, we didn't have much of
an opportunity to meet one another. I didn't recognize others in our
group except the Clarke's.

About a half a dozen executives, including a Hopkins' VP, watched all
our moves. Jim used a megaphone later, but was warned by a Baltimore
cop to desist. Jim quit. One VP tried to stop me from going into
the parking area in front of the main entrance. He told me it was
private property. I told him I was going to the restroom in the main
building. He said I was denied entry. I said, sorry I am going
anywhere that I liked on Hopkins' property, because I was a Johns
Hopkins' patient and I showed him my JHH ID "orange card". He bade
my pardon and I went on.

When I spotted these guys, I took five or six photographs of them
standing around, just to tick them off.

The lunch traffic at the entrance to the hospital slackened by
1:30. I left shortly thereafter. Others, including the Clarke's, remained.
Jim and Joan were most kind and considerate to all of us. Joan said
she and Jim were going to do it again.

That's it. No arrests, no scuffles with cops, no broken windows -
just alot of not and disruption during a few hours in front of Johns
Hopkins. Will Hopkins administrators respond? Probably not, but it
won't stop, until they do.

Good job, Joan and Jim. Take care of yourselves. Many others are
following what happened today.

Bill
Wright, justapatient

Patients' Rights Trampled as Medical Negligence Spreads to Epidemic Proportions; Press Conference and Demonstration, October 4

People Against Medical Malpractice (PAMM) supports the “Patients’ Bill of Rights,” the public’s “Right To Know,” and the National MEDiC Act.

 

Contact: Jim and Joan Clarke, 610-421-8300, Factfinders27@...

 

BALTIMORE, Sept. 28 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Patients’ Bill of Rights provides the patient with the right to have access to appropriate high-quality health care, the right to know all their treatment options and to participate in decisions about their care, the right to review and copy their own medical records and request the physician amend their record if it is not accurate, relevant, or complete. Finally, the patient has the right to a fair, fast and objective review of any complaint they have against the healthcare provider.

However, the Patients’ Bill of Rights does not provide for the unsafe conditions in hospitals caused by the preventable medical negligence which kills 195,000 people annually and maims and catastrophically disables countless hundreds of thousands more. “Wrongful deaths” from preventable medical negligence kills patients at the rate of 23 per hour, while the homicide rate in this country is only 2 people per hour.

People have the right to:

 

• Know whether doctors and hospitals have a history of causing catastrophic harm,
   
• Legal representation free from sabotage due to lawyer pay-offs from hospitals,
   
• A full investigation by their State Attorney General into the violations of state criminal and civil laws by any healthcare provider,
   
• Know that doctors and hospitals that violate federal and state laws will be subject to legal action against them by federal and state prosecutors,
   
• Know if a healthcare provider alters or destroys their medical records,
   
• Know the identity and medical specialty of each attending physician,
   
• Know the infectious disease rate in any hospital that they go to for treatment,
   
• Know about the “Patient Blacklist” doctors maintain on people who try to recover damages from devastating injuries incurred at the hands of doctors and hospitals,
   
• Know that the medical delivery system (hospitals and doctors) has morphed into a system that is no longer on their side,
   
• Know that most doctors routinely assist negligent doctors to cover-up the harm done to people in hospitals,
   
• Know that state and federal agencies often will not help them investigate and prosecute these criminal activities.

People must now demand that doctors and hospitals be subject to the same laws as everyone else i.e. when they cause egregious harm, punishment must apply to them as it would to anyone else.

People Against Medical Malpractice (PAMM) supports the National MEDiC Act which is designed to establish a National Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation (MEDiC) Program. The goal of the MEDiC Program is to: (1) improve the quality of health care by encouraging open communication between patients and health care providers about medical errors and other patient safety events; (2) reduce the rates of preventable medical errors; and (3) ensure patients have access to fair compensation for medical injury due to medical error, negligence, or malpractice.

People Against Medical Malpractice (PAMM) is organizing a patient safety demonstration in front of Johns Hopkins Hospital, located at 600 North Wolfe Street in Baltimore, Maryland, to sound the alarm to the ever-growing danger that exists in our American hospitals. On Wednesday, October 4, 2006 (rain date October 11th) there will be a press conference at 11:30am and the demonstration will follow immediately.

 

Press Conference and Demonstration Details ---

 

When: Wednesday, October 4, 2006, 11:30 AM

 

Where:  Johns Hopkins Hospital, 600 North Wolfe Street, Baltimore

 

This demonstration is a “Call to Arms” for the public to speak out with their signs, pictures and voices and to demand safer hospitals, accountability from doctors and hospitals, and justice from the Courts!

Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2006 19:48:26 +0200
From: g_upham <g_upham@...>
To: pulsecolo@...
Subject: HIV in children from dirty care!

Dear friends,
You know my engagement against dirty injections in health care,
Dr Modibo Dicko had told the 2004 World Health Assembly, in presenting
the WAPS program that injection safety was priority for WHOAFRO
considering the presence of HIV. I was shocked to get these news
yesterday See below (the news item below was all over the international
media, this one if from POZ, the US based publication of people with HIV).
- for those interested, a scientific publication I co-authored -that
appeared early September, in one of the scientific publication on
hospital infection control, makes at attempt at re-evaluating the risk
of HIV transmission, in /Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology/,
volume 27 (2006), pages 944�952.
Up to now the efficiency of HIV transmission through dirty medical
procedures was calculated from accidents of Health Care Workers, and
never from the risk posed to patients by dirty injections- 9 billion a
year, etc. Of course, this publication is in my own name with my company
and P4PS is not mentioned.
web:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/resolve?id=msid:ICHE2004299&erFrom=-3759256792263992486Guest
I have full article in pdf for those interested.
see also below an August publication on women in Zambia contracting HIV
through dirty care.


49 Children Infected With HIV in Kazakhstan Hospital

Created: 08.09.2006 14:54 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 15:15 MSK* *

MosNews

Kazakh authorities say at least 49 children have been infected with HIV
in hospitals in the south of the country, Radio Free Europe reported on
Friday. Authorities in Shymkent instigated wide-scale testing after the
discovery in July that 14 children had been inflected. They believe the
children were infected with the virus by non-sterilized syringes, or
transfusions of contaminated blood in three separate children�s
hospitals in the area.

The Kazakh Health Ministry confirmed the new figure in a statement,
saying more than 6,000 children remained to be tested for HIV in the region.
Kazakh parliamentarian Yerasyl Abylkasymov on September 6 said he had
asked the prosecutor-general�s office to prosecute Southern Kazakhstan
Region�s health and administration officials.

references documenting HIV and dirty injections in Africa:

Factors associated with HIV prevalence in a pre-partum
cohort of Zambian women
Authors: St Lawrence, J.S.1; Klaskala, W.2; Kankasa,
C.3; West, J.T.2; Mitchell, C.D.4; Wood, C.2

Source: International Journal of STD & AIDS, Volume
17, Number 9, September 2006, pp. 607-613(7)

Publisher: Royal Society of Medicine Press

Abstract:

An ongoing study of mother-to-child human herpes
virus-8 (HHV-8) transmission in Zambian women (n =
3160) allowed us to examine the association of medical
injections with HIV serostatus while simultaneously
accounting for other factors known to be correlated
with HIV prevalence. Multi-method data collection
included structured interviews, medical record
abstraction, clinical examinations, and biological
measures. Medically administered intramuscular or
intravenous injections in the past five years (but not
blood transfusions) were overwhelmingly correlated
with HIV prevalence, exceeding the contribution of
sexual behaviours in a multivariable logistic
regression. Statistically significant associations
with HIV also were found for some demographic
variables, sexual behaviours, alcohol use, and
sexually transmitted diseases (STD). The results
confirmed that iatrogenic needle exposure, sexual
behaviour, demographic factors, substance use, and STD
history are all implicated in Zambian women's HIV +
status. However, the disproportionate association of
medical injection history with HIV highlights the need
to investigate further and prospectively the role of
health-care injection in sub-Saharan Africa's HIV
epidemic.
>
>
>
>

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/nyregion/20barnabas.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

 

August 20, 2006

Hospitals Grew With Medicare Paying the Way

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

LIVINGSTON, N.J. — The St. Barnabas hospital system spent much of the last decade in a sprint to expand through aggressive mergers, political connections and celebrity patrons like the actor Joe Pesci, growing into New Jersey’s largest health care provider and the state’s second biggest private employer.

But the rapid rise in the prominence of St. Barnabas — which at one time had 3,200 beds in nine hospitals throughout the state — was also fueled by what federal prosecutors called one of the most lucrative Medicare fraud schemes in the nation’s history.

By systematically inflating the bills for their sickest elderly patients, the prosecutors said, the executives of the St. Barnabas Health Care System bilked the federal government of at least $630 million from 1995 to 2003. The hospital system, which is a nonprofit institution, eventually stopped the overcharging when it was publicly questioned, and in June the hospital system and its executives, who had been threatened with criminal prosecution, agreed to repay the federal government $265 million.

St. Barnabas has rejected allegations that it defrauded Medicare. In the settlement, it did not acknowledge any deliberate wrongdoing, and last week, Ellen Greene, a spokeswoman for St. Barnabas, described the situation as the result of a misinterpretation of Medicare’s complex rules. She said the company was glad to have gotten past the problem and was focusing on its health care mission.

What happened at this health care system, based largely in suburbs throughout New Jersey, is representative of how hundreds of hospitals around the country, facing pressures from cuts in reimbursements by private insurers, improperly charged the taxpayer-financed Medicare program billions of dollars.

The episode at St. Barnabas, whose legal problems are not over, is part of a wave of Medicare fraud investigations that, according to a federal report, have reached more than 450 hospitals nationwide. Experts said the money involved could exceed $6 billion.

“The way the system has operated, it’s almost irresponsible corporate governance for hospitals not to cheat Medicare,” said Patrick Burns, an analyst at Taxpayers Against Fraud, a leading watchdog organization.

The problems began a decade ago, when hospital administrators around the country —facing cuts in reimbursements from managed care companies — turned to a handful of accounting firms that promised to help them maximize their financing from Medicare, the nation’s health insurance program for the elderly.

By exploiting loopholes in the complex formula that Medicare uses to reimburse providers for their most expensive cases, known as outliers, many hospitals’ federal aid doubled, quadrupled or increased 10 times.

St. Barnabas received more federal Medicare money from the pool of outlier money than some national chains 10 times its size. In 2001, the aid accounted for more than 15 percent of St. Barnabas’s total revenue, at least five times a typical percentage, and, according to depositions from former employees, the hospital system’s bookkeepers were ordered to hide the money elsewhere in the budget to avoid arousing the suspicions of auditors.

Ms. Greene declined to comment on that allegation.

Fearing that a harsher fine might run the St. Barnabas health care system out of business, federal prosecutors said St. Barnabas had been required to pay back less than half of the amount it overbilled.

A few weeks after the government case against St. Barnabas was settled, Tenet Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, agreed to repay $788 million of the $1.9 billion it had been accused of overcharging. No one involved in either case faced criminal charges.

After their Medicare subsidies shrank, both St. Barnabas and Tenet closed hospitals, costing hundreds of employees their jobs and disrupting medical care for the communities they had served. Still, in New Jersey, where state officials are impaneling a commission to close a dozen or more hospitals, St. Barnabas finds itself in a far stronger financial position than many hospitals that were not suspected of skirting the law.

As recently as the early 1990’s, St. Barnabas — which was named after a martyr who sold his possessions to help the poor, but is not run by the Roman Catholic Church — operated with a low-key business approach usually found at institutions that are licensed as nonprofit.

Faced with pressure from managed care insurance plans and the prospect of federal health care reform, the system’s chief executive, Ronald J. Del Mauro, voiced determination to firm up St. Barnabas’s financial stability. He preached a strict devotion to the bottom line and engineered a bold set of mergers and acquisitions.

By 1996, St. Barnabas ran seven hospitals in northern and central New Jersey, with 4,000 affiliated doctors, more than 20,000 employees and a million patients. According to depositions by a St. Barnabas consultant and two former employees, which were filed in the settlement, the drive for profits soon affected the Medicare billing, and hospital administrators found a way to capitalize on a loophole in the formula Medicare used to determine reimbursements in outlier cases.

One part of the equation was based on a hospital’s retail charges: the amount paid by the small percentage of patients who do not have insurance. By rapidly increasing retail charges for procedures often covered by Medicare, St. Barnabas got a steep increase in federal aid. As a result, its Medicare payments for outlier cases jumped to $287 million in 2002 from $85 million in 1998.

A consultant hired to work with St. Barnabas said in a sworn deposition that the hospital’s top executives held meetings to plan a “corporate directive” to increase federal aid by raising the prices charged to Medicare patients. The consultant, James T. Monahan, said that St. Barnabas had routinely added hidden charges to the room-and-board fees of Medicare patients and tried to conceal the windfall profits it was receiving from Medicare, in part by overstating its debt.

Mr. Monahan, who later filed a whistle-blower complaint under which he stands to gain millions of dollars from the legal settlement, declined to be interviewed for this article.

St. Barnabas was hardly alone in that practice. Hundreds of other hospitals were using similar tactics to artificially boost their Medicare payments, and many were clients of two accounting firms that specialized in helping clients do that.

The fraud was so extensive, Medicare officials said in 2003, that to restrict the number of outlier claims, they had to raise the threshold for qualified cases in each of the previous five years: from under $10,000 in 1998, to more than $33,000 in 2003.

Despite the years-long surge in questionable Medicare payments across the country, federal auditors did not undertake a widespread investigation until October 2002, when Kenneth R. Weakley, an analyst for UBS Warburg, wrote a report warning investors that Tenet was receiving an “extraordinary” and unsustainable amount of outlier financing.

As they announced the settlements with Tenet and St. Barnabas in June, Justice Department officials said they were satisfied that they had collected a substantial sum of money without risking an uncertain outcome at trial and without endangering the viability of the two hospital systems. David Knowlton, executive director of the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute, an advocacy group, said that even though the settlements did not recover all the fraudulently obtained funds, they would provide a strong deterrent.

Officials of St. Barnabas pointed out that they had not admitted any wrongdoing and said they were relieved to be able to focus their attention on health care without the distraction of an investigation.

“This agreement,” Michael Slusarz, a vice president and spokesman for St. Barnabas, said in a statement in June, “will allow us to focus our energy and resources on our mission of providing the highest quality of care to our patients.”

As the state begins deciding how many, and which, hospitals to close, St. Barnabas is in an enviable position by virtue of its size, its reputation for providing quality health care and its political contacts in Trenton. For instance, the state’s health commissioner, Fred Jacobs, was senior vice president of medical affairs at St. Barnabas before being appointed to his current post, and Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s deputy chief of staff, Jeaninne LaRue, was a senior vice president and lobbyist for St. Barnabas. The company has also had a long relationship with Senate President Richard J. Codey, whose district in Essex County has some St. Barnabas facilities. During Mr. Codey’s 14 months as acting governor, his administration approved St. Barnabas’s application to perform highly profitable angioplasty procedures without having a cardiac surgical backup, an arrangement that some health care advocates criticized as favoritism. Mr. Codey insists that the decision was made based on the recommendations of a committee of health care experts, and that he was not personally involved.

“I certainly try to support the hospital, because it’s important for the community and a large employer, but there’s nothing more to it than that, ” he said.

St. Barnabas continues to face legal scrutiny, however.

A class-action suit filed by two hospitals, one from Colorado and one from Maine, claims $514 million in damages because the overbilling by St. Barnabas deprived “all of the legitimate hospitals of aid they were entitled to,” said Hal Hirsch, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. Wall Street rating agencies downgraded St. Barnabas bonds after the government settlement was signed and the hospitals’ lawsuit was filed.

Hundreds of nonprofit hospitals across the country are being scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service and examined by Congress to determine whether they are following guidelines that forbid tax-exempt entities to give executives excessive compensation.

The United States attorney’s office in New Jersey declined to comment on whether the executive pay structure at St. Barnabas was part of any inquiry. But two people who had been questioned by Justice Department investigators said they had been asked for documentation on how Mr. Del Mauro and two other top administrators at St. Barnabas are paid.

Mr. Del Mauro gets no compensation from St. Barnabas Hospital Center, according to its public filings, but he and two other senior administrators are paid officers of SBC Management, a profit-making company that does business with the hospital center. That sort of arrangement is common in the hospital industry.

In 1998, Mr. Del Mauro received $613,000 from SBC, according to documents on file with the I.R.S. His compensation was $4.7 million in 2003, the last year St. Barnabas received the huge Medicare overpayments. In 2004, it was $4.2 million.

Speaking on Mr. Del Mauro’s behalf, Ms. Greene, vice president for public relations and marketing at St. Barnabas, said that she was unable to provide details about Mr. Del Mauro’s compensation or the amount and type of business transactions between the hospital and SBC Management, but that the hospital was complying with the law and the federal tax code.

Bipartisan Legislation to Create Special Health Courts is Introduced in U.S. Senate

• To restore fairness and reliability to the medical justice system by fostering alternatives to current medical tort litigation, including the creation of a special health care court, that promote early disclosure of health care errors and provide prompt, fair, and reasonable compensation to patients who are injured by health care errors;
• To promote patient safety through early disclosure of health care errors; and
• To support and assist states in developing such alternatives.

• At present, less than two percent of patients with medical injuries due to substandard care file a claim, and even fewer receive compensation. Those fortunate enough to receive compensation will have waited an average of four years in the court system before receiving a dime.
• The current system cannot reliably distinguish good doctors from bad ones, which exposes medical professionals who have done nothing wrong to the risk of ruinous liability. Eighty percent of claims involve situations where doctors did no wrong. Nonetheless, plaintiffs receive compensation in a quarter of these cases.
• The current system harms patient quality and safety. Fear of litigation drives costly and inefficient "defensive medicine," while creating incentives for health care providers to cover up their own mistakes and the mistakes of their colleagues. This culture of silence prevents doctors from learning from mistakes, and leads to needless suffering and death.

From: "Mary Anne Wyatt" <mawyatt@...>
To: "Jeni Dingman" <pulsecolo@... >
Subject: Please Post Plastic Disasters
Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 06:28:05 -0400

Jeni, please post this to the list.  I do not know how to do it.  Thanks, Mary Anne

 

HBO: Plastic Disasters

 

http://www.hbo.com/scripts/video/vidplayer.html?movie=/av/documentaries/plasticdisasters/plastic_disasters+section=documentaries+num=1147815572345+title=HBO%20Documentaries:%20Plastic%20Disasters+tunein=

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From: ICorina@...
Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 07:40:45 EDT
Subject: articles needed
To: HHask@..., pulsecolo@..., rgibson@...

Have you heard the term " No one in healthcare wakes up in the morning wanting to hurt someone"?  I have heard it once too often.  I have no idea if they do or not but I surely know that no one can speak for everyone.

 

I have started saving articles (and would love your help getting more) about medical people, nurses, doctors, dentists who have committed crimes or caused injury - sometimes not related to healthcare.

 

Medical folks always say that "no one in healthcare wants to hurt someone".  That is not a fair statement and that is one of the things I believe is causing us problems.

 

Some doctors and nurses are criminals and some are just not good at their work but keep working.  If we allow that kind of remark to continue "no one in healthcare gets up in the morning wanted to injure someone" we have opened the doors to allow medical people who are injuring and killing to continue.

 

I would never say "no patient wakes up in the morning wanting to sue their doctor"  I have no idea if they do or not.  I know what I have dealt with and what I have seen - no more, no less.

 

But, I continue to read about medical people who have committed crimes, acted inappropriately causing pain to someone and sometimes unrelated to healthcare have caused harm (drunk driving, sexual relations, stealing body parts)  and have a collection piling up.  Please keep your eyes open for these kinds of articles

 

thanks.

 

ilene

From: ICorina@...
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 13:55:01 EDT
Subject: Readers Digest Reporter
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

 

Please distribute appropriately.  The following was received after a phone conversation.  The contact information follows.

 

 

 

Reader's Digest magazine is working on a story about medical errors.  Our story focuses in part on errors that occur in pathology labs.  These errors include misidentification of lab specimens (attaching the wrong ID label to the specimen), misinterpretation of the specimen resulting in incorrect diagnosis, loss of the specimen, etc.  Our article examines the prevalence and impact of these types of errors, and suggests ways to help patients and medical professionals reduce the risk of such errors occurring.

In order to raise awareness about this problem, and convey the full human impact of these errors to our readers, we would like to include a real-life story of a patient who has been the victim of a lab error.  Specifically, we would like to present readers with a case in which a patient's lab specimen (such as a blood sample or tissue biopsy) was mixed up with that of another patient, leading to an incorrect diagnosis.  In other words, a case in which a patient was told he or she had a disease, such as cancer, based on another patient's tissue sample, as a result of a mix-up of the two patients' specimens in the lab.  We would also be interested in any cases involving a misinterpretation or faulty analysis of a specimen by the pathologist or lab technician, leading to misdiagnosis.

In order to effectively convey the impact of this problem to our readers, we would need to be able to use the error victim's full name in our article.  The error must have resulted in some harm to the victim--either physical or emotional.  The incident must have occurred within the last five or six years.  The incident must be fully verifiable, and the hospital or other healthcare professionals involved must have reached some legal settlement with the victim, or otherwise acknowledged liability for the error.

If you have undergone an experience similar to that described here, and would be willing to share your story for publication in Reader's Digest, please contact me by Thursday, May 25, at the following email address: joseph_vetter@...

Thank you for your help in raising awareness about this public health problem.

Sincerely,
Joe Vetter
Reporter
Reader's Digest
joseph_vetter@...