SAME Cafe - So All May Eat

Not exactly. They wouldn’t be at the hospital if they were perfectly healthy. :smiling_face:

What’s happening is errors in treatment are killing them when whatever was wrong with them wouldn’t have been considered potentially fatal in the first place. Giving wrong medicines, misdiagnosis, inappropriate surgical procedures, exposure to disease pathogens that go unchecked, etc.

I was a senior examiner for the National Quality Award (aka the Baldrige Award) for several years and specialized in the evaluation of hospitals. The really good ones are fanatics about patient outcomes and eliminating errors. There are incredibly detailed and we’ll articulated standards of treatment designed to keep people from getting sick or dying inappropriately due to the care they get in the hospital setting. Hospitals are audited and graded on how they perform and how they respond to failures.

Most hospitals don’t dedicate the resources necessary to be better than good. The really good ones measure in the dozens nationwide.

And yes, 1200 people die everyday from “oops, my bad”.

Henry probably has a lot of stories about the audits and the preventative procedures and the controls. But I bet he isn’t allowed to admit to any life-ending errors.

4 Likes

We have a very strong quality process at the hospital with a blameless culture to get people to admit and report errors so they can be prevented (I often report minor issues that have happened to/by me). We also have a public admission program for when we do cause harm (we were the first hospital to post our error stats on our website along with our JCHAO report in entirety). Healthcare is extremely messy and remember we operate like a job-shop where each job is a custom order of a new untried product (much harder to catch errors when every task is different). because each pneumonia, heart failure, hot gallbladder, etc are all different and while there are of course commonalities, creating strong standards often annoys patients who don’t want cookbook medicine

6 Likes

It’s those messy humans that get in the way :slight_smile: And a culture that expects risk-free lives.

More robots!

With lasers :wink:

8 Likes

That we have… at $1.5m a pop…

10 Likes

Thank you so much. You rock! I also stay away from the news, makes it easier to stay positive.