A truck safety organization found 14% of commercial trucks had dangerously defective brakes on one day in April. A few months later the results weren’t significantly better following the organization’s full week of inspections devoted to truck brake safety.
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) is a consortium of truck safety officials and state law enforcement officers. Its mission is to make trucking safer and prevent fatal commercial truck crashes.
Negligent Truck Drivers
CVSA periodically conducts roadside inspections of truck drivers and their ...
A little less than half of St. Louis hospitals recently earned average to below-average grades for patient safety.
The Leapfrog Group is an independent, non-profit patient safety organization. For 10 years it has been grading hospitals on patient safety and steps to prevent serious medical errors. It issues grades twice a year, in the spring and fall. It recently issued its Fall 2022 hospital grades.
Leapfrog states that most hospital medical errors can be prevented and notes that 1,000 hospital patients die every day due to a preventable medical mistake. A 2016 Johns Hopkins ...
Misdiagnosis is a medical error that kills up to 80,000 patients every year. A group of medical safety experts has compiled a list of steps hospitals should take to prevent diagnostic errors.
According to the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, misdiagnoses harm more patients than all other medical errors combined. One-third of medical malpractice lawsuits that involve the patient’s death or permanent disability allege a diagnostic error.
Types of Medical Misdiagnosis
A diagnostic error can involve:
· Wrong diagnosis – patient is incorrectly diagnosed
· Missed ...
As fatal commercial truck crashes continue to rise, safety is not a high priority within the commercial trucking industry.
According to the federal government’s most recent statistics (“Traffic Safety Facts 2020”), nearly 5,000 people were killed in crashes involving large trucks in 2020. More than 70% of those who died were passengers in vehicles other than the truck.
Rise in Fatal Commercial Truck Crashes
The number of people who died in commercial truck accidents in 2020 compared to 2011 rose 31%. In Missouri in 2020, commercial trucks were involved in almost 10% of the ...
The nation’s leading organization of doctors devoted to proper healthcare for infants, children and adolescents recently issued a blueprint for preventing serious medical errors during emergency care to young patients.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is comprised of 67,000 pediatricians. In October it released a revised policy statement on safe emergency department care for children. (“Optimizing Pediatric Patient Safety in the Emergency Care Setting”)
It was issued jointly with the American College of Emergency Physicians and the Emergency Nurses ...
Careless truck driver behavior is a leading cause of commercial truck crashes. The trucking industry this month published research that predicts the negligent truck driver actions that are most likely to cause a crash.
The number of people killed in tractor-trailer crashes has risen steadily. According to federal government reporting, deaths from catastrophic commercial truck accidents rose 13% between 2020 and 2021 alone.
The government’s 2006 “Large Truck Crash Causation Study” is the most comprehensive look into the causes of commercial truck accidents to date. It ...
International Infection Prevention Infection Week in this country was established 36 years ago. This year’s observance was October 16-22.
One out of every 31 hospital patients suffers a hospital-acquired infection (HAI), a potentially serious medical error. HAIs reportedly kill tens of thousands of patients every year in the United States.
Common Serious Hospital-Acquired Infections
HAIs occur during a hospital stay or within 30 days after discharge. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it monitors specific HAIs due to their threats to patient safety ...
The U.S. Department of Transportation has deemed October National Pedestrian Safety Month. A review of pedestrian fatalities in recent years reinforces the importance of this awareness effort. The number of pedestrians killed in motor vehicle accidents is markedly on the rise.
According to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), more than 6,100 pedestrians were killed in 2020, a nearly 4% increase over the year prior. In 2020, one pedestrian was hit and killed every 81 minutes.
Almost a quarter of all pedestrians who died in a traffic crash in 2020 were ...
Medication errors are preventable yet injure over 1 million patients in the United States every year. One-fourth of those patients experience life-threatening injuries.
These facts come from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), a nonprofit organization whose mission is to prevent medication errors. ISMP collaborated with the World Health Organization to promote World Patient Safety Day on September 17. The annual one-day observance serves to educate the public on serious medical errors, with a particular emphasis this year on drug administration mistakes.
Over just three days in May, inspectors found thousands of commercial trucks with defective brakes so dangerous they were immediately taken off U.S. roads.
Catastrophic truck crashes can be linked to maintenance issues, such as defective brakes and defective truck tires. The Commercial Vehicle Alliance, a coalition of law enforcement and safety officials focused on making commercial trucking safer, holds an annual event, called International Roadcheck, to stop poorly maintained trucks from hurting others.
This year’s International Roadcheck was held May 17-19 ...
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