USA Today reports that Dennis Quaid has become the frontman for a campaign to improve patient care. Mr. Quaid’s 10-day onld twins were given a potentially fatal dose of Heparin while in the care of a respected hospital in Los Angeles, California. Fortunately, the children pulled through and were not permanently harmed.
Mr. Quaid takes issue with the secrecy and lack of transparency when it comes to medical mistakes. He states:
“When a crash happens, it’s so public,” he said. “No one is going to fly on their airplanes unless they have that trust. But when a mistake occurs in a hospital, the public might never hear about it. Although an estimated 100,000 Americans die each year because of medical errors, their deaths are scattered over thousands of hospitals, “where people die anyway,” Quaid said. “It doesn’t get the same type of attention.”
Mr. Quaid understands the problem when it comes to medical errors. In my practice, we receive dozens of calls every month from medical malpractice victims who are not fully informed of what actually happened, and why the error was committed in the first place.
What is so disturbing is that medical errors kill 100,000 people every year — more than the number of people killed every year in car accidents. But the public doesn’t know about it. Many of these victims and/or their families have no idea that an error was committed.
I admire Mr. Quaid’s efforts to raise awareness about the prevalence of medical errors and the number of deaths that these errors cause every year. I hope it pays off.
