Thursday, September 29th, 2016
Stephan: Nearly One-third -- 29 Per cent -- of patients who receive Re-hab treatment suffer harm from their treatment. I doubt that many of us knew that, but that is the conclusion of a recent government report. And it reveals what all previous reports have shown: America's Illness Profit System is a failure. The U.S. system for providing healthcare is a grotesque parody of what healthcare should be because, like everything us in our culture, it is run to make profit not actually accomplish its ostensible purpose.
It's not that individual nurses, doctors and therapists in the system don't want to do the right thing, it is that they are thwarted by the demand that there be profit above any other consideration. Here is the latest bad news.
Rehabilitation treatment Credit: www.covenantcare.com
Patients may go to rehabilitation hospitals to recover from a stroke, injury, or recent surgery. But sometimes the care makes things worse. In a government report published Thursday, 29 percent of patients in rehab facilities suffered a medication error, bedsore, infection or some other type of harm as a result of the care they received.
Doctors who reviewed cases from a broad sampling of rehab facilities say that almost half of the 158 incidents they spotted among 417 patients were clearly or likely preventable.
“This is the latest study over a long time period now that says we still have high rates of harm,” says
Dr. David Classen, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Utah School of Medicine who developed the analytic tool used in the report to identify the harm to patients.
“We’re fooling ourselves if we say we have made improvement,” Classen says. “If the first rule of health care is ‘Do no harm,’ then we’re failing.”
The oversight study, from the office of the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and […]
