You never know what’s coming for ya

I finally saw the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button this weekend and woke to a bright morning thinking the movie’s refrain “You never know what’s coming for ya.” So I was primed for the unexpected as I read the troubling content on Dead By Mistake, a site that features the results of a Hearst investigative report on medical errors. The site’s most compelling feature is the set of 30 profiles and heart wrenching photos of lives lost unexpectedly under circumstances that certainly seemed preventable.

This new content echoes the report we released in May as part of our Safe Patient Project.  Our report, To Err is Human—To Delay is Deadly, looks at specific infection-preventing practices state by state and the status of legislation to make hospital infection rates available to consumers.  Ten years ago the Institute of Medicine declared that as many as 98,000 people die each year needlessly because of preventable medical harm, including health care-acquired infections. Ten years later, we don’t know if we’ve made any real progress, and efforts to reduce the harm caused by our medical care system are few and fragmented. In fact, we gave the country a failing grade on progress on select recommendations we believe necessary to create a health-care system free of preventable medical harm.

Reading this content made me mad.  Not wanting to feel helpless too, I signed the petition and then reread Consumer Reports' recent article on hospital ratings and steps to take to assure better care.  I made sure my husband read the same articles since he’s my health care proxy and he and I recently talked our way through The Five Wishes, an well conceived booklet on advance planning for medical care and end-of-life decisions by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Maybe I don’t know what’s coming for me, but if there’s a hospital stay involved and if things go bad, at least I feel a little better prepared.  Now, back to the sunshine.

—Elena Falcone, Consumer Reports Information Analyst

Take a look at how hand washing can help prevent hospital infections, watch the Dead by Mistake video (above) with Safe Patient Project director, Lisa McGiffert, and find out how you can help stop preventable medical errors.

Comments

[Paul Malley, President, Aging with Dignity]

We appreciate Ms. Falcone's kind words about Five Wishes, the closest thing there is in America to a national advance directive. More than 13 million copies are in national circulation, distributed by more than 15,000 partner organizations. Point of clarification: Five Wishes was created in 1997, in part through a generous grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is no longer a grantor, nor is there a current funding relationship between RWJF and Aging with Dignity, a national non-profit organization. We sustain ourselves solely through sales of Five Wishes and related support materials.