Medical error can have devastating effects. Here, in their own words, Connecticut families tell the stories of how medical error changed their lives forever.
James Mason
When my father fell on his hip, I called an ambulance. I didn’t know at the time if it was broken or if he had just bruised it. I also didn’t know if the “care” he would receive as a result of that fall would directly contribute to his death.
That day, when the ambulance arrived, I gave the driver a list of my father’s medications. By the time I arrived in the emergency room, that list had already been lost.
I have since learned about the volumes that have been written about the fact that medical error has reached epidemic levels. My father became part of that epidemic when he was subjected to:
• Excessive morphine that contributed to muscle contractions in his throat.
• Improper installation of a feeding tube that collapsed his lung.
• Poor communication with and among hospital personnel.
• Proximity to very ill patients while in a compromised state that assured his exposure to infection.
• Inadequate infection control hygiene among staff members.
While hospitalized, improper care, incorrectly and insufficiently educated staff, and exposure to infections made my father very ill. One in twenty patients in hospitals become infected after admission.
My father contracted a serious, “hospital-acquired” infection – MRSA, methicillin- resistant staphyloccus aureus, which often does not respond to available antibiotics. As his condition worsened, doctors put him in a drug-induced coma.
My father told us he didn’t want heroics. Yet invasive and aggressive technology was repeatedly forced on him. Compounding the problem, during a three-week period, I never heard from his physician who had treated my father for over twenty years.
In all the talk about health care reform and accessibility and quality, we have ended up with a health care system that is not working. At least it isn’t working for the patient.
Payment sources, schedules, technology all come first. Our system is not patient-centered. Our health care system seems to have evolved into something that we do not want while common sense has been left behind.
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