An investigation by Canada’s largest regulator of pharmacists found that a hospital in south-central Ontario was allowing an unregulated pharmacy assistant to work in its pharmacy without required supervision by a licensed pharmacist. The work included entering doctor’s prescriptions into the computer prior to being sent to the nursing floor. The investigation followed complaints that […]
(Published in The Huffington Post, October 8, 2014) Thomas Eric Duncan, the patient who was sent home by a Texas hospital even while presenting with the early stages of the Ebola virus, has died. Each day, families around the world face the tragedy of medical errors and hospital mistakes that end in death or extreme […]
A government agency in Ontario has called for nursing homes in that province to re-evaluate their use of anti-psychotic medications like quetiapine (marketed under the brand name Seroquel). Health Quality Ontario says that up to 60 percent of residents in some nursing homes are receiving the drug. In the majority of cases, the medication is […]
A recent article in The Atlantic called “The Hospital is No Place for the Elderly,” raises troubling concerns about the future of healthcare for the elderly. Here is an excerpt: Seniors with five or more chronic conditions account for less than a fourth of Medicare’s beneficiaries but more than two-thirds of its spending—and they are […]
The burdens of caregiving cannot continue to be borne by the typical middle-aged woman who is too worn-out to voice outrage or too depressed to advocate for a fairer deal, while society reaps all the savings in healthcare costs. When we think about medical errors in hospitals or nursing homes, we often think about the […]
If society wants the benefit of the reduced health care costs that come from keeping the elderly or those suffering from illness and injury in their homes and out of institutions, it is going to have to show more enlightened thinking toward those who are making these savings possible. Read more in HuffPost.
What if an epidemic wiped out the entire population of Dallas and continued on to Canada to kill everyone in Kingston, Shawinigan and Victoria? Just the possibility would be enough to create a North American-wide healthcare emergency. Yet medical errors in the United States will kill, by conservative estimates, some 1.2 million people between 2014 […]
NDR Decisions Need to be Made a Whole Lot Safer, More Transparent and Less Emotionally Harmful for Patients and Families. A recent landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada rejected a doctor’s unilateral right to deny life-sustaining medical treatment to a patient over the family’s objections. Attention needs to turn now to another life […]
The CBC’s White Coat/Black Art has come up with another stunner: clinicians in some situations where they think a resuscitation is not really appropriate will go about it so slowly that it amounts to a DNR. They even have a name for it: Slow Code. Just when you think deception in healthcare can’t get any worse, […]
Many Canadians have learned the hard way that their healthcare system is not nearly as safe as it needs to be. Lack of adequate accountability is keeping it that way. And the reason, as more and more are discovering, is because it works so well for hospitals, policy makers and, now, lawyers. My family’s eye-opening […]