 by
Michael Millenson
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Here’s a quiz for Patient Safety Awareness Week (and after): The number of Americans who die annually from preventable medical errors is: . A) 44,000-98,000, according to the Institute of Medicine B) None, thanks to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s “100,000 Lives Campaign” C) 90,000 D) No one’s really counting The correct answer is, “D,”... Read the rest of this entry »
by
Michael Millenson
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A recent front-page article in the New York Times conveyed grim news about patient safety. The first large-scale study of hospital safety in a decade concluded that care has not gotten significantly safer since the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 estimate of up to 98,000 preventable deaths and 1 million preventable injuries annually. What for me... Read the rest of this entry »
by
Michael Millenson
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By the fourth sentence of the preface to The Silent World of Doctor and Patient, Jay Katz has quietly issued a startling challenge to a fundamental principle of the doctor-patient relationship. He writes: It took time before I appreciated fully the oddity of physicians’ insistence that patients follow doctors’ orders. During my socialization as a... Read the rest of this entry »
by
Michael Millenson
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PAIN (Chicago, June 19 – June 21) I sit down at a circular table in the high-ceilinged meeting room and conversationally ask the two women already there what brought them to this three-day conference. The first replies that she had a daughter die from a medical mistake. The other, a nurse, lost a son to... Read the rest of this entry »
by
Michael Millenson
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Back in November, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee wrote a remarkably candid essay for a special election issue of the trade journal Modern Healthcare. Since then, the former Arkansas governor’s campaign has morphed from single-digit obscurity to mainstream prominence, and the candor on health care has mostly been scrubbed clean from his Web site. Nonetheless,... Read the rest of this entry »
