What a terrible story. My condolences to all involved.
Salaam. A
Bosda,
I didn’t follow up your thread… I thought you would be OK by now. Sorry to hear it is not really solved yet.
Salaam. A
According to a story in this month’s Reader’s Digest, something around 10,000 people in Canadian hospitals die annually due to medical errors. Ten thousand. Very few medical professionals or hospitals are held accountable. Apparently only 20% of legal actions against doctors result in judgement in favour of the plaintiff.
Sometimes I think my irrational fear of doctors and hospitals is really not all that irrational.
I’m so sorry for your loss, Shadez.
Triss, just be sure to remember the difference between mistakes and complications.
Sometimes everyone does everything right, and there is still a bad outcome. Other times, there are multiple errors made, and the patient still does fine. All too often, avoidable errors result in harm to patients.
Absolutely, QtM.
In fact, one of our local newstations, (CTV if any other Hogtownians are interested) had this as their first story on the 11:00 news. The numbers of deaths in Canadian hospitals that they gave was doubled, though. Somewhere over 20,000 annually. (!) Due to medical errors, not complications. What hospitals apparently call “adverse events”.
But at least it’s being dragged out into the light to be dealt with. They were saying one of the problems is the packaging that medication comes in. Toxic drugs are packaged in very similar containers to others, potassium chloride for example. One of the anecdotes in the magazine article I referenced above was a 33 y.o. man who was killed by an inadvertent injection of this stuff. Despite his attempts to stop the nurse by telling her twice that the injection was burning and making him dizzy, she persisted and he was dead before she finished. Right in front of the horrified eyes of his parents.
I know the above is just anecdotal, but there’s no question that something very disturbing is going on in Canadian hospitals.
You have to remember as well Triss that while these are experienced professionals using expert equipment and advanced procedures, the basic premise of an operation is cutting a person open. The simple fact is that as much as we dress the premises up it is still a somewhat primitive way of healing someone. Doctors are still imperfect creatures and accidents will unfortunately happen, but this point you made,
goes to show that sometimes the system which should keep us safe in fact fails us. It is situations like these that should be dealt with and urgently.
First, my sincere condolance for your loss, losing a friend is a deep sadness.
Second, I want to say how much I admire your words. Last summer I had an operation to fix some stomach problems. Instead of fixing me, I am severely worse. Life hasn’t been great these last 10 months, vomitiing, lack of sleep, choking on my own stomach contents while I sleep. It would be easy to hate. But in the end, a doctor is still just human and mine did everything the could to make me right. I have been asked so many times if I’m gonna sue. Nope. If it had been done with open malice or if he was negligent consistently, I would, in the hopes of getting him out of the business, but no, not just because he made a mistake. I thank God that I don’t work in a business where my mistakes can affect lives - I’d be screwed since I make mistakes weekly. Like you said:
I realize that people are human and imperfect. I haven’t had many positive experiences with the medical industry but neither have I suffered very severely. But I have been treated with utter disregard by too many professionals, had my concerns ignored and been given wrong prescriptions, both in the wrong name and the wrong drug altogether. Yes just mistakes but both times with the prescription errors, both doctors made nervous mention that they could lose their license over it. There were no apologies nor explanations. They were more afraid of what I might do, not what might have happened. I was put in the absurd position of reassuring them that I would do nothing, was given the correct prescription and rushed out the door.
Anyways, even so my discomfort with medicine as it is today is still admittedly rather nebulous considering that many people have a positive experience and result. My fears do have elements of irrationality, I recognize that.
But unfortunately it is nonetheless true of Canadian medicine that accountability has been sorely lacking.
If anyone’s interested, the article from the Reader’s Digest is online here and there’s also something about the news story I saw last night here.
What bothers me isn’t that medical professionals make mistakes, it’s the disturbing disregard for proper follow-up, communication, and lack of accountability. This is a systemic problem here, not necessarily only an individual competence problem.
Without a doubt there are systems problems. Prescription errors with occassionally devastating consequences are high on the list, and can be fixed by adoption of the right technology (Electronic Medical Records - EMR - with med options and doses and with intelligent software to check for drug-drug interactions built in) but the technology has to get both user freindly and affordable enough. But Tris, please realize that our current litiginous system exacerbates the fear of participating in programs to improve upon the medical systems or even to truely understand the nature of the problem and to develop the solutions. Or to even to apologize since the fear is that such admits culpability and will be used against you.
But for all of those who function under the delusion that more testing and procedures somehow equates with better care, this sad story illustrates how choosing to do nothing is sometimes a wiser course. Even the most benign intervention has real risk even if it is rare. The allergic reaction to the medication, the bizzare idiosyncratic reaction, the fatal bleed. When given a prescription or an order for a test it is very reasonable to question the doc about whether or not you really need it, and to not leave until you understand why. There is no trivial medical intervention. Of course doing nothing incurrs a risk too. Managing your health is about choosing and manging your risks. Hopefully, but not always, wisely.
My condolences Shadez. Very tragic. Very sad.
I’m sorry to hear of your community’s loss, Shadez. 