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 ...