I know I talk about this topic a lot, but I thought I’d let a local hospital tell it’s story. I had a patient this past week that handed me an unbelievable piece of print. He happens to live within the Immanuel St. Joseph’s Mayo Health Systems area. This is the hospital in Mankato, Mn. This is from the Summer 2007 Hometown Health mailer they sent out to what appears to be everyone within their area.
This is on the front page
“The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) estimates that as many as 15 million incidents of medical harm occur in U.S. hospitals each year…
–which reveals between 40 and 50 incidents of harm occur for every 100 hospital admissions…
– or 40,000 incidents of harm in U.S. hospitals every day.”
Dr. Altman here— are you kidding me, it looks like you have a 40-50% chance of being harmed if you get admitted to a hospital. My goodness, how come nobody takes this stuff seriously. Mayo clinic published this and mailed it to people. I’m still stunned.
They of course are promoting a new campaign. Now it sounds good on the surface, see if you can spot what’s wrong with it.
“The 5 Million Lives Campaign engages hospitals to improve more rapidly than before in order to protect patients from five million incidents of medical harm over a 24 month period, ending December 9, 2008.”
Dr. Reasonable here again—Two problems. Number one, “over a 24 month period” The statistics are for each year. That means they are only trying to stop 2 ½ million incidence of HARM per year NOT the 5 million they seem to imply. Problem number two, why don’t they want to stop the whole 15 million? Now those are deep thought.
Entries (RSS)