by Forest Grene

Created on: July 31, 2008   Last Updated: August 07, 2008

A doctor's creed, "To do no harm," may need to be applied to nurses, medical technicians and hospital boards throughout North America and Europe.When people and systems are careless, tired, overworked and negligent, patient's lives are affected. When patients are undergoing procedures, they are often not in the right head space to be able to evaluate whether or not they are in good hands.

Joan Little's article of July 28,2008 in The St, Louis Beacon reports the cost to patients and their family members when improper reporting of hospital errors occurs. In the one instance where doctors were upfront about an accidental morphine overdose by the nurse, the family were better able to deal with their son's death. The hiding of information does not benefit anyone.When the question arises of how better reporting could be utilized, there are some important points to consider.

Primarily, if a hospital wants to be held accountable for it's successes, it most certainly has to be held accountable for it's failures.Is it possible for a simple report to be placed on a main wall, reporting the successes and errors of treatment, so that individulas using the service have up to date and acuurate information right at their fingertips. Just as hospitals have walls covered with the names of those who donate to the facility, could they have a wall desiganted for the statistics of treatment, updated monthly?

The information chain could be accessed off the internet as well, but for many vulnerble or marginalized patients, this will not occur for them. They will continue to trust their doctors and their communities, beleiving their best interests are being considered. Unfortunatley, in this day and age, we cannot rely on our government or our country systems to make decisions based on our best interests. Our country tends to make financially based decisions. We can see examples of this with fuel prices, food prices, housing costs, with our health care system, in options for elder care, treating the marginalized homeless and even treatment towards our troops overseas.Why on earth would we blindly choose to trust a hospital? It is a business, afterall.

One of my biggest concerns is the rate of hospital infection due to the de-centralization of cleaning, laundry and food services.Rather than rely on dedicated hospital employees, the hospital chooses to find the cheapest bidder outside of the institution and contract out for services. All of us shake our heads when this occurs as we know

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