This section is under construction and will be amended with various global caces and useful links.
Recent global cases/warnings:
March 2013 - Another doctor caught, this time in Brazil. Once again mechanism how she and nursers helping her killed patients at intensve care described, horrible example how easy it is to kill people in intensive care when rules and ethics just kicked away, link to Reuters story here.
September 2012, Wall Street Journal - "How to stop Hospitals from Killing us". Brilliant article by surgeon Marty Makary at US Johns Hopkins Hospital. Link here.
March 2013, CNN, the hospital murder case in Uruguay, another mechanism used described. Link here.
You can also look for relevant data at following sites:
1) In a state like ex-Soviet Estonia where most of leading health officials still on duty learned their moral standards and got their education from Soviet era, medical errors are taboo topic, something both health professionals and government officials try to treat as minor problem that is almost not existing.There is no objective medical errors surveillance institutions and the calls of Patient Advocacy Association and even UN human rights committee have been simply ignored.
In US attention to medical errors escalated only this century with the release of a study from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), To Err is Human, which found that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year in U.S. hospitals due to preventable medical errors. Hospital errors rank between the fifth and eighth leading cause of death, killing more Americans than breast cancer, traffic accidents or AIDS. Serious medication errors occur in the cases of five to 10 percent of patients admitted to hospitals. These numbers may understate the problem because they do not include preventable deaths due to medical treatments outside of hospitals.For more info: http://www.kaiseredu.org/Issue-Modules/Reducing-Medical-Errors/Background-Brief.aspx
January 2010, The New York Times: Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm (NYT: Patients often know little about the harm that can result when safety rules are violated and ever more powerful and technologically complex machines go awry. To better understand those risks, The New York Times examined thousands of pages of public and private records and interviewed physicians, medical physicists, researchers and government regulators.)
2) Some tips how you can to try to avoid medical errors: 8 Ways to Avoid Medical Mistakes.
3) Nurses often don't speak up about incompetent colleagues or when they see fellow health-care workers making mistakes that could harm patients, new research finds. Study: Reluctance to Speak Up Encourages Medical Errors.
4) Newsweek, on how to save lives and cut medical errors: Medical errors kill 100 000 patients annually.
5) US Agency for Health Care Research and Quality: 20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors,
6) Sept, 2011, CBS NEWS: Study suggests even privacy curtains may be a source of infectious bacteria, including potentially deadly staph. (For the study - presented at conference in Chicago - scientists swabbed 43 hospital curtains twice a week for three weeks. They analyzed 180 samples, and found germs on 119. Twenty-six percent of curtains tested positive for the potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria known as MRSA, and 44 percent tested positive for a form of Enterococcus bacteria - some of which were antibiotic resistant. Researchers also placed 13 new curtains in a hospital for the study. Within a week, 12 were contaminated.).
7) There are many doctors who share useful tips for patients in blogs, one is here. I saw the site from a link at New York Times health care website to a story by doctor who outlined 10 reasons when it might be good to look for second opinion and a better doctor.
8) We all wish to think that most doctors and nursers do their job with commitment and we can feel safe when we or our loved ones the help of medical professionals in hospitals.
But there are also lot of warning cases about the doctors and nursers who have killed deliberately their patients, some of them seemingly believing that they either have right for that or that the killing is part of their some kind of "mercy act". You can find these cases and what some convicted nursers or doctors have used to kill the patients in net, simply searching with relevant words.
Recent global cases/warnings:
March 2013 - Another doctor caught, this time in Brazil. Once again mechanism how she and nursers helping her killed patients at intensve care described, horrible example how easy it is to kill people in intensive care when rules and ethics just kicked away, link to Reuters story here.
September 2012, Wall Street Journal - "How to stop Hospitals from Killing us". Brilliant article by surgeon Marty Makary at US Johns Hopkins Hospital. Link here.
March 2013, CNN, the hospital murder case in Uruguay, another mechanism used described. Link here.
You can also look for relevant data at following sites:
1) In a state like ex-Soviet Estonia where most of leading health officials still on duty learned their moral standards and got their education from Soviet era, medical errors are taboo topic, something both health professionals and government officials try to treat as minor problem that is almost not existing.There is no objective medical errors surveillance institutions and the calls of Patient Advocacy Association and even UN human rights committee have been simply ignored.
In US attention to medical errors escalated only this century with the release of a study from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), To Err is Human, which found that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year in U.S. hospitals due to preventable medical errors. Hospital errors rank between the fifth and eighth leading cause of death, killing more Americans than breast cancer, traffic accidents or AIDS. Serious medication errors occur in the cases of five to 10 percent of patients admitted to hospitals. These numbers may understate the problem because they do not include preventable deaths due to medical treatments outside of hospitals.For more info: http://www.kaiseredu.org/Issue-Modules/Reducing-Medical-Errors/Background-Brief.aspx
January 2010, The New York Times: Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm (NYT: Patients often know little about the harm that can result when safety rules are violated and ever more powerful and technologically complex machines go awry. To better understand those risks, The New York Times examined thousands of pages of public and private records and interviewed physicians, medical physicists, researchers and government regulators.)
2) Some tips how you can to try to avoid medical errors: 8 Ways to Avoid Medical Mistakes.
3) Nurses often don't speak up about incompetent colleagues or when they see fellow health-care workers making mistakes that could harm patients, new research finds. Study: Reluctance to Speak Up Encourages Medical Errors.
4) Newsweek, on how to save lives and cut medical errors: Medical errors kill 100 000 patients annually.
5) US Agency for Health Care Research and Quality: 20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors,
6) Sept, 2011, CBS NEWS: Study suggests even privacy curtains may be a source of infectious bacteria, including potentially deadly staph. (For the study - presented at conference in Chicago - scientists swabbed 43 hospital curtains twice a week for three weeks. They analyzed 180 samples, and found germs on 119. Twenty-six percent of curtains tested positive for the potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria known as MRSA, and 44 percent tested positive for a form of Enterococcus bacteria - some of which were antibiotic resistant. Researchers also placed 13 new curtains in a hospital for the study. Within a week, 12 were contaminated.).
7) There are many doctors who share useful tips for patients in blogs, one is here. I saw the site from a link at New York Times health care website to a story by doctor who outlined 10 reasons when it might be good to look for second opinion and a better doctor.
8) We all wish to think that most doctors and nursers do their job with commitment and we can feel safe when we or our loved ones the help of medical professionals in hospitals.
But there are also lot of warning cases about the doctors and nursers who have killed deliberately their patients, some of them seemingly believing that they either have right for that or that the killing is part of their some kind of "mercy act". You can find these cases and what some convicted nursers or doctors have used to kill the patients in net, simply searching with relevant words.
