So Should Hospital Mistakes be Public?
The State of Washington has offered the opinion that the new medical malpractice law allows hospitals to NOT release to the public
The medical-malpractice law passed last year does prevent public disclosure of individual hospitals' reports of errors such as performing surgery on the wrong body part or leaving behind objects in surgery patients, the state Attorney General's Office has advised the Department of Health.
So Hospitals announced that they would no longer release error information to the public. Once they did that the public outcry was huge and they seemed to have reversed their position.
The Washington State Hospital Association has changed its stance on the public disclosure of hospitals' preventable mistakes, saying now that it won't try to block the release of information about errors such as leaving instruments inside patients and performing the wrong operations.
After a story Tuesday in The Seattle Times highlighted the association's legal efforts to prevent such disclosures, the phones started ringing, association spokeswoman Cassie Sauer said.
"Your article made us realize that people really want the information," she said. "There's been a lot of reaction to this, more than we expected."
Seattle Times
The info should be public. It helps people decide whether to use a particular hospital or not. That is the kind of information that actually helps improve health care. Now I do not think that the error reporting should be used in medical malpractice lawsuits. The reason is that hospitals should be free to report these errors and not worry about the reports being used against them in cases. Why? Because if you allow that then nobody will report errors or they will report them poorly. Allow the hospitals a reporting system that lets them improve their quality of care systems.
