Do shorter hours for doctors equal better care for patients?

Can doctors focus on patient care and be well rested?

Would you feel safe going to the hospital knowing your doctor had 20 minutes of sleep over the past 24 hours?

“To be honest, I don’t really know if this is better or worse,” she said, recounting how she felt she was signing over responsibility for her patients more often than she ever imagined she would, missing key events in their hospital course and even getting dismissed during the middle of a patient’s operation in order to stay within the limits on work hours.

Contaminated IV fluid responsible for deaths in Alabama hospital

Montgomery Alabama hospital discovered bacteria in IV fluids which was responsible for the deaths of nine people.

A contaminated IV fluid may have been involved in the deaths of nine hospital patients in Alabama, health officials said.

Bacteria is transmitted only through IV fluids and the public is not at risk for contamination.

Depressing study about patient safety at hospitals

A new study taken over the last decade indicates that efforts to improve patient safety and cut down on medical errors at hospitals have not had much effect.

The study, conducted from 2002 to 2007 in 10 North Carolina hospitals, found that harm to patients was common and that the number of incidents did not decrease over time. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs and hospital-acquired infections.

“It is unlikely that other regions of the country have fared better,” said Dr. Christopher P. Landrigan, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The study is being published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

It is one of the most rigorous efforts to collect data about patient safety since a landmark report in 1999 found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries a year in the United States. That report, by the Institute of Medicine, an independent group that advises the government on health matters, led to a national movement to reduce errors and make hospital stays less hazardous to patients’ health.

We’ve just gone through a bruising fight on health care reform, but patient safety is something all of us should be able to agree upon. We need national standards to help reduce medical errors.

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