Huge medical error deaths & hospital risk management

"Do no harm" but 100,000 Americans die annually from medical "adverse events"; "system failure" rather than "individual fault"; death probability 10,000 times greater from medical error than from air travel; truth vital.

This outstanding Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program was broadcast on Australia's ABC TV Four Corners investigative progam.

World's Best Practice Rational Risk Management - applied very successfully in aviation and the nuclear power industry - successively involves (a) getting accurate information and encouraging "no blame" reporting; (b) objective scientific analysis ; and (c) systemic change to improve the safety of the system (as opposed to the more typical "blame and shame" approaches applying in society as a whole - which have the effect of greatly inhibiting the crucially important reporting that is required to find out how avoidable deaths or accidents have happened).

If you have access to a library see an excellent account by Professor James Reason "Human error: models and management", British Medical Journal, vol. 320, pp 768-770, 2000 (or search for key terms on the Web).

Of course, this approach applies to all other areas of society (but notably in high risk areas such as heavy industry and defence). The annual probability of dying from a Muslim-origin non-state terrorism attack in Australia is about 1/1,000,000 as compared to the annual probability of dying from a medical "adverse event" (or from smoking) of about 1/1,000. No Australians have died domestically from terrorism in 3 decades - yet "spin" and politics-driven "terror hysteria" have directed billions of dollars into counter-productive wars while 18,000 people in Australia (population 20 million) continue to die each year from medical "adverse events".

In the US (population 300 million) about 100,000 people continue to die annually from medical "adverse events". Yet under Bush, politically-motivated "terror hysteria" has directed efforts into the counter-productive Bush Wars (2.3 million post-invasion avoidable deaths and 1.6 million post-invasion avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories and an economic cost to the US of $1-2 trillion according to US Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5489/42/ , http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ ).

"Spin", untruth and "blame and shame" are deadly both at home and abroad.