Hi All, >From the pages of the UK newspaper "The Independent" which I've been told by several of our British contributors is reliable:
"NHS gives wrong treatment to 500 hospital patients a week By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor Published: 11 July 2007 "Hospital staff gave the wrong treatment to the wrong patient on almost 25,000 occasions last year, leading to deaths, serious injury and long- term harm, official figures show. Errors in identifying patients led to at least 500 a week getting the wrong operation the wrong drugs or diagnostic tests, the National Patient Safety Agency said. "No breakdown of the figures was available yesterday to show how many had died or been seriously harmed and how many escaped injury. The agency admitted the total could be much higher because many incidents went unreported. "Almost 3,000 of the incidents are estimated to have occurred because of confusion over wristbands used to identify patients. An investigation found that the colour red on a wristband had eight different meanings in different NHS trusts, ranging from "allergic to penicillin" to "does not have English as a first language"." The full article is available at: http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article2753392.ece To my U.S. friends: I don't know about you, but it doesn't look to me that universal health care is the panacea for all our system's ills that some make it out to be. Platt Platt moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
