When Arizona patients go to a hospital for a procedure or surgery, they expect their doctors and other health care practitioners to take care of them properly. However, there are some steps that patients can take to keep themselves as safe as possible.
Study finds difficulty in tracking major surgical errors
Arizona patients who have gone through surgical procedures may be interested to know that researchers with the RAND Corporation's Evidence-based Practice Center found that a number of factors contribute to major surgical errors, but the errors are so rare that it is difficult to get reliable data on them. Such occurrences are called "never events." The three types of events tracked by the researchers using data from 2004 to 2014 were surgical fires, leaving an object in a person and wrong-site surgery.
Some of the causes of surgical errors
Arizona patients may be interested in learning about a recently-published study regarding surgical 'never events", which name is derived from the belief that they should never happen. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic found 69 of these never events out of 1.5 million invasive medical procedures that had been performed over a five-year period at the Minnesota facility. The researchers learned that a total of 628 human factors contributed to these mistakes.
Issues with electronic health records in Arizona
The idea behind electronic health records, or EHRs, was that patient files would be more complete and easily accessible. However, the reality is that there have been a number of unexpected consequences, and their implementation may actually be reducing the quality of patient care. Issues have become so common and severe that many malpractice suits are now being filed against providers based in part on the improper use of EHRs.
