Drug Medical Information

GOODBYE" BYPASS -"HELLO' CIIEIATION! A HOSPITAL IS NOT A PLACE TO GET WELL

Besides the obvious dangers, there are many unacknowledged perils that present a legitimate cause for concern. For starters, consider the hazards of hospitalization. In the early days of this century, the famed physician Dr. Henry E. Sigerist called hospitals "temples" of medicine and good health. There's little doubt he'd be distressed to see how his 'temples' have since been defiled. More than a third of the nation's hospitals fail to meet standards designed to guard patients against a medical calamity, according to a three-year survey of 5,208 facilities conducted by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations that ended in 1988. Among their dismal findings: fifty percent of the facilities did not properly monitor patients in intensive care and coronary care units; thirty-five percent did not supervise blood transfusions properly; fifty-six percent did not properly supervise routine care. It gets worse. In the most comprehensive study ever conducted in the U.S., Harvard University researchers concluded that negligence kills thousands of people in hospitals each year and injures many more. What goes wrong? Just about everything. The researchers found frequent mechanical failure of technological marvels: defective defibrillators, anesthesia machines and cardiac monitors, to name but a few. They found untrained and unqualified technicians operating medical equipment Added to the above, there's the risk of anesthesia. Surveys conducted at Harvard Medical School over a fifteen year period have uncovered a long list of chilling errors that occur during anesthesia. While 'only' 10,000 deaths from anesthesia administration are reported each year, investigators suspect the number could easily be three to four times as high. Among the common errors are syringe swap (wrong drug inadvertently administered), ampule swap (assistant hands over the wrong substance because many different drugs have like-sounding names), drug overdose, wrong choice of drug, wrong choice of administration technique (all due to judgment error by the anesthetist), disconnection of intravenous lines, breathing circuits and other attachments (equipment failure or unfamiliarity of lack of experience with the technology).

*11\297\8*