Heroes Not Zombies

I guess most people would agree with my attitude that if you can manage to avoid hospitals you should. Yes, they are necessary, but, yes, they are dangerous too. How dangerous? Well, a study from the University of York has taken the approach of reading through the records of a thousand patients admitted to one hospital and found almost one in ten of those admitted suffered from an adverse event. They reckon about 30 to 50% of these could have been avoided.

“Our research does confirm though that hospitals are not completely safe places, and that people should try to steer clear of them unless absolutely necessary.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said

“As the study suggests, many adverse events could be avoided if lessons were properly learned and fed back into practice.”

That’s the challenge and that’s part of the answer. Medicine is a person-intensive activity. We should be investing in the training and practice of everyone who works in hospitals. Not just the clinicians. The people who work in hospitals all have important jobs to do and if they don’t do them to the best of their ability all the time, patients suffer. We need to foster a culture of reflection and learning, of continual improvement, not of blame. It’s not about targets. It’s about people.