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Pregnant Teen Died Of Medication Error At St. Mary's Hospital

The late Dr. Robert Mendelsohn used to say that going in to the hospital should be like going to war. You go in only if you absolutely have to, you take all the qualified allies you can find, and you get in and out as fast as possible.

Errors happen in the best of hospitals, because ultimately we are all human and we all make mistakes. I can only imagine what hell on earth the nursing staff at this hospital are going through. No one intentionally makes even a slight error. But right now we have a illness care chaos in this country, not a health care system. With the best of intentions, and more $$$$ per capita spent than most of the industrialized world, we still have some of the worst outcomes overall.

We have too many specialists, and not enough generalists. We have lots of high tech rescue procedures and not enough basic prevention available. We have committees that focus on nit-picky details and ignore the big picture.

I don't pretend to have the answers. I will continue to do what I can from inside to try to protect my patients and help them to get and stay healthy. And, BTW, I refuse to demean my patients by calling them consumers. They are not just economic entities who purchase a commodity of health and illness care - they are human beings to whom I have a responsibility in response to the trust they have put in me.

I think that we need to return to the days when we saw medicine, nursing, and midwifery as a sacred covenant.

2 Comments

We'll never again see medicine, nursing and midwifery as a sacred covenant because of the "priesthood" of the HMOs and insurance companies which get in the way of those callings. As long as nurses are underpaid and overworked and midwives are disregarded, and doctors are too full of themselves to devote adequate time, then who is going to administer the sacrament of medicine? It's akin to devaluing the priesthood and the eucharist and then wondering why people aren't flocking to the churches.

Any guess what "wrong medication" they used to induce her? And why was she being induced--if for convenience, then shame on the hospital, but if for medical necessity, perhaps the same medical problem that caused the induction was what caused her death?

Regardless, how tragic for the family, and for the little boy who will grow up motherless.

I think they put epidural medicine in an IV. I'd agree with the above comment, however, one other thing -- even with good insurance, our family pays out the nose. $600/month for insurance, HUGE deductibles and co-pays, hurried doctors who aren't part of our lives -- the power imbalance is inherent in the relationship -- at least on some level we expect perfection and leave no room for error, we're paying too much!

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This page contains a single entry by alicia published on July 18, 2006 11:14 PM.

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