Attend a conference on the "epidemic of medical errors" in June 2012
October 06, 2011
The Ontario Council of Healthcare Unions (OCHU) is sponsoring a conference on "Epidemic of Medical Errors and Hospital-Acquired Infections in the United States and Canada: Systemic and Social Causes" at the University of Toronto, June 4, 2012. The conference, and a book with the same title (to be published February 2012 and distributed to those in attendance), are intended to organize a social movement and raise awareness of what is missing in the current debate on medical errors.
According to conference organizers, medical errors and hospital-acquired infections are the second or third leading cause of death in the U.S., each claiming approximately 100,000 lives, injuring hundreds of thousands more and changing the quality of life for many. Canada's numbers are proportionately similar.
Organizers say we have a health-care delivery system that has built within itself systemic causes of medical error and hospital-acquired infection. The statistics are alarming. According to a recent study in the Journal of Health Affairs, April 2011, one in three patients is affected by medical error, nosocomial infection or pharmaceutical error, and if the systemic causes are not addressed, the numbers will not go down.
The June 2012 conference will look at:
- The systemic and social causes of epidemic.
- For-profit and factory medicine.
- Staffing ratios, shiftwork, health-care working conditions, bullying.
- Legal issues that conflict with safety issues.
The above noted are directly related to medical error and infection, say conference organizers, but are not dealt with by the health-care delivery system, as it would mean changing the system.
A follow-up conference will be planned in 2013 with workshops that will be more solution-based.
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