Preventable deaths

There is a terrible concept called "preventable deaths" in hospital management. In a 1999 report called "To Err Is Human", the Institute of Medicine estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year because of preventable hospital errors.
Photo by hanspetermeyer.co Flickr CC

Changing attitudes

In the book "Superfreakonomics", the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, comments that the number of deaths by preventable hospital errors are:

...more than deaths from motor-vehicle crashes or breast cancer - and that one of the leading errors is wound infection. The best medicine for stopping infections? Getting doctors to wash their hands more frequently.

Apparently even world-class hospital Cedars-Sinai Medical Center had a hand-hygiene rate of only 65%. There are of course practical reasons, a doctor might interact with more than one hundred patients per shift and the time taken just to wash hands would seriously lower the number of patients seen. More importantly, there seemed to be psychological components as well to the lack of hand-washing.

Perception deficit

During a five-month study at a children's hospital in Australia doctors self-reported a 73% hand-washing rate, but nurses that checked on them recorded a low 9%.

Paul Silka, an emergency-room doctor at Cedars-Sinai admits that arrogance might be a part of the problem.

The ego can kick in after you've been in practice a while. You say: 'Hey, I couldn't bee carrying the bad bugs. It's the other hospital personnel.'

Luckily there are a lot of efforts to lower the "Health-Care Associated Infection - HAI" rates. People like Barbara Dunn and her "Not on my watch" campaign, will certainly make a difference.

The hot stove effect

If you put your hand on a hot stove, you will learn in a matter of milli-seconds to not do it again - it is painful, immediate and personal. But, if the consequences of what we do happens to others, far away and a long time from now - our capacity to learn is limited. Another factor is personal responsibility, in the famous Milgram experiments, test subjects tortured imaginary persons to death, if an authoritarian figure said that he took responsibility.

The combination of distance in time and space, effect on others and lack of personal responsibility can easily turn us all into monsters!

"Accidental deaths" in companies

If hospitals working with human life can make so much preventable errors, what is then happening in other industries? How much preventable errors do you have in your organization? And, what do you intend to do about it?