Opinion: Hospitals can reduce errors with simple safety protocols
Over the past couple of decades, hospitals have implemented safety protocols to prevent medical mistakes—but more improvements can be made, according to author Larry Tye, director of the Health Coverage Fellowship at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication.
In a July 14 opinion piece in STAT News, Tye wrote about his recent wrist surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He noticed that clinicians repeatedly asked him to confirm his identity and surgery details, and labelled his hand with the surgery location.
“Such obsessing would have annoyed most patients, but I was tickled,” Tye wrote. “It reminded me how much things have changed, for the better, since I wrote a four-part series on hospital errors a quarter-century ago for the Boston Globe.”
He added, “Today’s simple, if irritating, measures have saved lives as well as embarrassment.”
Still, he noted that preventable hospital errors—including operations on the wrong part of the body and administration of incorrect medication doses—continue to occur, and that such errors are believed to kill roughly 200,000 patients every year in the U.S. “Too few hospitals foster the culture of safety that I experienced at Mass General. Such a culture means putting in place the multitiered checks and rechecks we associate more with airline cockpits and nuclear plants than surgical suites,” he wrote.
Read the STAT News op-ed: 25 years ago, I reported on horrifying hospital errors. Here’s what’s changed since then — and what hasn’t
