by Paisley Place

Created on: December 04, 2008   Last Updated: December 16, 2008

Common sense dictates that a hospital is one of the safest places during a medical emergency; however, this is no longer the case. Medical incompetence and mistakes are on the rise. The top four categories of hospital injuries fall within four categories: 1. critical shortage of competent staff, 2. inexperienced medical personnel without experienced oversight, 3. erroneous medical mistakes in medical records transcribed by outsourced medical transcriptionists from overseas without any formal education in medicine or fluency in the English language, 4. doctors playing bureaucrats then tossing the Hippocratic Oath out the window, what in the end lining their own pockets on the lives and deaths of patients they promised to care for when ill.

Shorting staff members is the highest direct to patient problem within hospitals. The patient to nurse ratio is worse than despicable, it is deadly. Often if one patient crashes, staff immediately go to work to save the patient's life but what happens when one, two, or three other patients need the same medical assistance at the same time? Should we leave these patients die; do we complicate all chances to save the life of the initial patient by spreading competent staff to save the others only to risk losing this patient?

Lack of nurses, especially experienced nurses creates chaos when it is time to dispense medicines. Too frequently patients receive the wrong medicine or develop complications when medicine is not taken at a precise prescribed time.. Patients are not in the hospital for kicks, they are sick. Medication is the primary course of treatment. Forgotten and giving wrong drugs to patients occur more frequently than hospital administrators and other facilities will admit.

The most avoidable mistake administrators make each day is to send medical doctor dictations to countries like India where women and men with no medical traning or English profiency transcribe the documents leaving many mistakes, often without correction before filed away. Should this patient come to the hospital in a nonresponsive state, the incorrect history and treatment will serve as the treatment guideline and can, if it not already, kill a patient. The administrator that used to be a doctor is not a beaurocrat who cares more about the bottom line than patient care. The hiring of MT companies out of India leaves the families of those that die due to incorrect records have no recourse since they do not fall within US jurisdiction. The families,

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