With heavy pressure on physicians and hospitals to improve patient safety, more are beginning to publicly disclose and apologize for medical errors. Some states are even now mandating that some form of disclosure be offered to patients in such situations.
Nearly 60% of healthcare workers do not practice regular hand-washing techniques while on duty, despite policies to do so. Hospital leaders say that while hand washing can be time-consuming, it's essential to patients' safety, and it's up to everyone to ensure that it's done properly.
Detroit babies are coming into the world earlier and less healthy than babies in other major cities, according to a national report of factors leading to infant death. The report by Kids Count covers numbers over a 15-year period ending in 2005. The report also found that Detroit mothers-to-be smoked more, were younger and had little prenatal care compared to mothers in other cities.
Anaheim (CA) General Hospital, a facility that treats a large share of poor patients, has been slapped with dozens of citations by two independent sets of regulators for inadequate staffing and poor medical care. The findings have placed the hospital's public and private funding at risk. Although the hospital is not expected to close down and is currently appealing the decisions, it must correct the problems to ensure that it remains open. According to one report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Anaheim General put patients "at immediate jeopardy" by not having life-saving medications available, having insufficient food and water for patients in the event of an emergency, and failing to ensure the safety of its psychiatric patients.
A recently passed Medicare bill takes authority away from the Joint Commission when it comes to hospital inspections, leaving the responsibility to CMS or another federal agency. Some believe this is a positive step toward ensuring accurate hospital inspections and ultimately patient safety.
The average time that hospital emergency rooms patients wait to see a doctor has grown from about 38 minutes to almost an hour over the past decade, according to statistics released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The increase is due to supply and demand, said Stephen Pitts, MD, the lead author of the report. Overall, about 119 million visits were made to U.S. emergency rooms in 2006, up from 90 million in 1996. Meanwhile, the number of hospital emergency departments dropped to fewer than 4,600, from nearly 4,900.