All Ontario, Canada, hospitals will have to start reporting on the number of cases they have of the potentially deadly C. difficile bacteria starting Sept. 30. Critics claim Ontario was too slow to come up with a plan to deal with C. difficile after it claimed 2,000lives in Quebec in 2003, and insist some of the 260 deaths reported so far in seven Ontario hospitals could have been prevented. They also say the public has a right to know the extent of the C. difficile outbreak in all 157 hospitals in the province.
Common bacterial infections can cause some cases of sudden infant death syndrome, according to the British researchers. According to the American SIDS Institute, the rate of SIDS has dropped dramatically since 1983 because of concerted prevention efforts. Researchers conducted autopsies on 546 infants who had died suddenly between the ages of 7 and 365 days.
In this posting, Robert Wachter, MD, who writes the blog Wachter's World, questions why there's so much buzz out there about medical errors while diagnostic errors go on everyday with little notice. He says that someday we may reach a point when all pneumonia patients receive antibiotics and heart patients are given aspirin in a timely manner, but if the doctors giving those orders are wrong in their diagnosis, we really won't have made any advances in patient safety.
Ohio-based health system Catholic Healthcare Partners ranked fifth for quality care in a recent study published in the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety. The report compared 73 hospital systems using data publicly reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The study included systems with six or more acute-care hospitals and examined data on 19 quality indicators.
As more immigrants to Greater Boston have created a higher demand for medical interpreters, the profession is racing to catch up.
Now a Boston-based group, the International Medical Interpreters Association, is pushing for a national certification program. The goal is to standardize the profession in medicine, which is the fastest-growing of all interpreter fields.
For thousands of residents of South Los Angeles who had depended on the large county-run King-Harbor hospital that closed in 2007, the past 10 months have been an exercise in cobbling together medical care. When King-Harbor was shut by federal officials, it became the 15th general acute care hospital to close in Los Angeles County since 2000. South Los Angeles continues to be one of the most difficult places in the nation to both receive and give medical care. Family doctors are few and far between, and the area is one of the hardest to draw new doctors to, physician recruiters say.