There was a significant uptick in the number of serious problems reported by Maryland hospitals in fiscal 2010, according to the annual report on patient care and safety released by state health officials. There were 265 top level adverse events reported in 2010, compared with 190 the year before. Health officials attributed the rise to better identification and reporting rather than more problems – particularly when it came to pressure ulcers. Falls remained the No. 1 adverse event at the hospital. They were followed by pressure ulcers and delays in treatment. These top level problems resulted in the death of a patient or serious injury. The hospitals were not named in the report, though the larger ones with more complex cases reported more problems, according to the state Office of Health Care Quality, which has been collecting the information from hospitals for six years.
The medical license of the Beverly Hills fertility doctor who assisted Nadya Suleman in conceiving octuplets will be revoked next month, the Medical Board of California announced Wednesday. The panel ruled that Michael Kamrava, MD, "did not exercise sound judgment" in the transfer of 12 embryos to Suleman. Kamrava was accused by the attorney general's office of being grossly negligent in his treatment of Suleman and two other female patients: a 48-year-old who suffered complications after she became pregnant with quadruplets and a 42-year-old diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer after receiving fertility treatments. "Public protection is paramount," the board said. "The board is not assured that oversight through probation is enough, and having weighed the above, has determined that revocation of respondent's certificate is necessary to protect the public." The revocation takes effect July 1.
A growing shortage of medications for a host of illnesses—from cancer to cystic fibrosis to cardiac arrest—has hospitals scrambling for substitutes to avoid patient harm, and sometimes even delaying treatment. "It's just a matter of time now before we call for a drug that we need to save a patient's life and we find out there isn't any," says Eric Lavonas, MD, of the American College of Emergency Physicians. The problem of scarce supplies or even completely unavailable medications isn't a new one but it's getting markedly worse. The number listed in short supply has tripled over the past five years, to a record 211 medications last year. While some of those have been resolved, another 89 drug shortages have occurred in the first three months of this year, according to the University of Utah's Drug Information Service. It tracks shortages for the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
Americans are finally making headway in the battle against high blood pressure, one of the biggest contributors to cardiovascular disease. At Kaiser Permanente's big northern California health plan, 80% of more than 600,000 patients diagnosed with hypertension, or high blood pressure, have the condition under control, up from 44% a decade ago. In the Southeast, 70% of nearly a half-million patients whose doctors participate in a South Carolina-based quality-improvement network had reduced their high blood pressure to medically recommended levels. That's compared with 49% in 2000. These achievements, reported last week at a meeting of the American Society for Hypertension, reflect broader gains against the problem nationwide. A major study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association that was based on national health surveys found that half of Americans with high blood pressure had it under control in 2008 compared with 31% at the beginning of the last decade and 27% in the early 1990s.
What's worse: Losing face or losing money? Under laws in more than two dozen states and new Medicare rules that went into effect earlier this year, hospitals are required to report infections — risking their reputations as sterile sanctuaries — or pay a penalty. That's left hospital administrators weighing the cost of 'fessing up against the cost of fines. For Clark Todd, CEO of Pacific Hospital in Long Beach, CA, there's only one way to go: "If we hide from the public, then the tendency to keep the status quo is stronger than ever," he said. "And that's just not going to get the job done." It's been more than a decade since a panel of top scientists declared hospital safety a national priority. Yet about 90,000 patients still die each year from preventable infections resulting from routine surgeries and hospital care, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Examples include infections resulting from contaminated tubes that deliver food and medications, and catheters that remove urine. Staph infections, which can be deadly, are a particularly serious problem.
Doctors say they are thinking twice about prescribing an Abbott Laboratories drug used to raise levels of good cholesterol to patients taking a statin pill that is successfully lowering their bad cholesterol. The change of heart by physicians about the need for Abbott's Niaspan follows the release last week of a National Institutes of Health study that showed the drug failed to prevent heart attacks and slightly raised the risk of a stroke when combined with the popular generic cholesterol pill simvastatin, also known by the brand name Zocor. Doctors say statins, including simvastatin, Lipitor and Crestor, do such a good job at lowering LDL, or bad cholesterol, that there's often little need to add another pill to most patients' treatment. And the study is giving them more reason not to add Niaspan, which raises HDL, or the good stuff.