Tens of thousands are harmed \u0027unintentionally\u0027 in Canada\u0027s hospitals every year. Legal privilege prevents us from knowing about it.
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The true scale is unknown. One in 17 hospitalizations in 2021-22 — roughly 140,000 out of 2.4 million hospital stays — resulted in someone experiencing a harmful event signIficant enough to require treatment or a prolonged hospital stay, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Pre-COVID, it was one in 18. But the statistics don’t tell the whole story.
It might be common parlance now, but “patient safety” wasn’t a term commonly used, outside a smattering of researchers, until the Baker-Norton study that found Canadian hospitals are risky places. “One of the downsides of a publicly funded, publicly administered system is that there’s a political element to it — politicians feel they’ll be beaten up if there are too many reports about problems in the system.”Rates of burnout have never been higher. A hollowed-out health-care workforce, high turnover, overrun emergency rooms, a crushing backlog of surgeries shelved during COVID shutdowns.
Not all adverse events are preventable, Baker stressed. Just over a third were judged preventable in the Baker-Norton report. Bad outcomes happen in even excellent hospitals. But even harms once considered a “complication” of doing business, like hospital-acquired infections, are now seen as largely avoidable.Still, even “never events” — entirely preventable critical incidents that should never happen under any circumstance — keep happening in every jurisdiction of the country.
No organization in the world is capable of rigorous self-examination, Horn and his colleagues argued. “If Air Canada crashes a plane, we don’t ask Air Canada to investigate. We’ve gotten a little bit better in policing — if a guy gets shot, they have an independent review.”With few exceptions, most cases of significant, preventable harm involve a breakdown in communication. Information doesn’t get passed along from nurses to doctors or vice versa.
who had both legs amputated below the knee when she was 11 months old, as well as her right hand and three fingers on her left, allege that the hospital and doctors involved in her care misdiagnosed her bacterial lung infection, which developed into sepsis and septic shock .
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