Lev Lazinskiy

Hospitals Bad for your health?

The title of this recent article really intrigued me, it showcases the role of complacency in the hospital setting and how dangerous that can be for the patients. It is not uncommon to see a whole host of life threatening errors in the hospital setting and the whole purpose of organizations such as the Joint Commission is to ensure that these types of errors do not occur.

The purpose of medicine is to help people, not harm them. Some of the most dangerous aspects of health care are medication error, inconsistent records, allergy information, and wrong site surgeries. For those of you that work in the health care field, and have seen patients with lists of medications that are several pages long, it can be very challenging to keep everything straight and to avoid negative reactions. Despite these challenges, it is vital that the health care team pay close attention because something as simple as mg vs g can kill a patient when it comes to some medications.

Medication errors are common, and difficult to avoid, the thing that baffles my mind is wrong site surgery. I used to work in a dermatology clinic and we did many surgeries there to remove skin cancer. If you have a patient with 100 moles on their body it can be difficult to figure out which one is the one that needs to be removed. The patient probably will not die, or have serious harm, if you removed the wrong mole (as long as you caught it). That is a whole different story than removing the wrong Limb, or eye, or finger. That is completely unacceptable.

Bottom line is that, it is very easy to fall into a routine and stop paying attention to detail. But in the medical field that is never acceptable. You have to be 100% on top of every little detail every single day, because peoples lives are in your hands.