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the moral is: patients need to pay attention and be assertive or they risk death or injury.
sad, sad, sad
Thank God for the internet.
Whoa Nelly. I would also point out that American medicine is much more heavily documented then in any other country. We generate a huge volume of paperwork, all of which can be accessed by subpoena or for internal quality control making it much more likely (especially as no other country even comes close to ours in terms of litigation) that errors will come to light.
In many other countries, medical errors are swept under the rug, so to speak, or never investigated at all. Granny died of natural causes in France. In America, somebody is to blame.
I also want to point out that we have a much sicker and older hospital population receiving much more aggressive intervention than in Europe where the emphasis is more on prevention and primary care where the errors take decades become apparent.
the moral is: patients need to pay attention and be assertive or they risk death or injury.
sad, sad, sad
Thank God for the internet.
Doubt it...like it was said earlier, just more of them get swept under the rug in other countries. Another point: most other countries don't have an army of lawyers searching through the paperwork looking for ways to sue anyone they can.
US patients "believed" they were the victims of medical errors. Sounds amazingly scientific!
Wow--I hope we are all more open-minded as physicians than we are on SDN. It's quite scary to see these responses to this article. This is a major problem, and while some of it may be due to a lack of assertiveness on the patient side or a cynicism, those cannot be the only factors.
I don't think there's anything wrong with critically analyzing data collection methods.
I also thought it was interesting that the patient reported rates of error in the US (34%) vs Canada (30%), perhaps even within the margin of error (not sure what that would be) and that they said that Austrailia had an error rate "Of about 1/5 or 27%" since 1/5 should be 20%.
Wow--I hope we are all more open-minded as physicians than we are on SDN. It's quite scary to see these responses to this article. This is a major problem, and while some of it may be due to a lack of assertiveness on the patient side or a cynicism, those cannot be the only factors.
Wow--I hope we are all more open-minded as physicians than we are on SDN. It's quite scary to see these responses to this article. This is a major problem, and while some of it may be due to a lack of assertiveness on the patient side or a cynicism, those cannot be the only factors.
And an unsolvable one. Too many patients who are way to sick trying to see too few doctors and its only going to get worse. It is impossible, for example, to have perfect continuity of care if you are a patient who would have been dead fifty years ago from any one of the comorbidities you currently carry and you are seeing six different specialists. There is not enough time in the day for your nephrologist to have an internet conference with your cardiologist, your family physician, your surgeon, and your hematologist each of the ten time you see him in a year.
So sorry.
alas the major downfalls of the US healthcare system
Wow--I hope we are all more open-minded as physicians than we are on SDN. It's quite scary to see these responses to this article. This is a major problem, and while some of it may be due to a lack of assertiveness on the patient side or a cynicism, those cannot be the only factors.
Wow--I hope we are all more open-minded as physicians than we are on SDN. It's quite scary to see these responses to this article. This is a major problem, and while some of it may be due to a lack of assertiveness on the patient side or a cynicism, those cannot be the only factors.
It's not a downfall, it's how things are. A socialized system like they have in Britain would crash and burn if implemented in the United States, at least from the perspective of my many of my multiply comorbid patients who have only been kept alive for the last fifteen years or so by the expenditure of vast sums of money on heart caths, dialysis, CABGs, colectomies, colostomies, PEGs, Trachs, hips, knees, pneumonectomies, radiation, and chemo....often on one patient.
The combination of CAD, CHF, ESRD, DM, COPD, PVD, HTN, and ICD, for example, is so common that it scarcely raises an eyebrow. Ho hum. Just another moderately sick patient.
What about all of the "comorbid" patients that live in Canada, BRitain etc?