"That's impossible. Burrrp."
Posted on 11/28/2007 5:52:30 PM PST by shrinkermd
Assuming that these statistics have some or great validity, then these problems surely need a remedy.
Great Britian has socialized medicine. I’m sure that contributes to the problem.
It appears that falls, infections and complications (however they define that) are included in the 90,000. Somehow makes the number almost meaningless.
"That's impossible. Burrrp."
Assuming that this is true, it still tells us nothing. It is the relative risk that counts. How many people would have died or been harmed without medical care? People who go to the hospital are often sick.
Anecdotal, yes, but it stood out.
[Assuming that this is true, it still tells us nothing. It is the relative risk that counts. How many people would have died or been harmed without medical care? People who go to the hospital are often sick.]
Do a 1:1 compare with the US. While we have patients die here, they have a large number that die in the halls awaiting processing so they never count as patients.
128 Americans died today - from traffic accidents...
The reference is to "falls, infections and complications" incurred in the hospital.
Quite a different thing.
Yes. My original statement still stands. If a person falls in the hospital, is it necessarily a hospital blunder? And while community-acquired infections in the hospital setting are hardly the ideal, getting rid of them is probably a utopian ideal (as the hospital is where the sick people are). And complication still remains undefined to me. Is a complication from a condition that the patient had prior to entering the hospital counted as a "hospital blunder"?
I'm sure your completely incorrect, irrevelant statement should have a deep impact on this thread, but damned if I can decipher it.
This appears to be the original article from which the Telegraph's medical writer did a back of the envelope arithmetic and wrote a headline.
They oughta close this hospital!
A hospital infection is, quite literally, the worst kind of infection. Its subject is already weakened and hospital germs (read: staph) are often highly virulent and immune to anti-biotics. American hospitals are super-sensitive to the risk of infection and take every effort to control them. Infections happen...but rarely.
The primary reason infection is relatively common in UK hospitals is because they are not clean. Notoriously so.
Normally, "complications" is a euphemism for pneumonia. Like staph, pneumococci are a risk in hospitals -- unless sanitation is scrupulously practiced.
In conclusion, these data reported in The Telegraph are damning to the National Health Care System in the UK. Whether anything can be done about it politically, however, is a large question.
In other words: don't take this report lightly; it could happen here.
Yes, thank you for the excellent post.
I read the study. I still don’t see where the deaths came from. Also, the article didn’t give me a good idea of what the problems were that they discovered. Probably just me, but I remain unclear on the basic issues.
Thanks again.
My statement is 100% correct.
My grandmother fell out of a hospital bed, broke her hip and died two weeks later. This tragedy could have been prevented by guard rails on the bed.
Guns don’t kill people, Doctors kill people.
In 2002, the number of hospital infections was 1.7 million for US facilities. Approx. 99,000 deaths as a result of these HAIs. While I wouldn't be completely surprised to see a higher rate of HAIs in a socialized medicine system like the UK, to characterize infection in the US system as rare is ridiculous. If you'd like to show that the rate of HAI infections is significantly lower in the US than in the UK, I'd be more than interested.
Whenever I visit the UK there is a medical horror story in the paper—people dying from kidney disease because they don’t have enough dialysis machines and technicians; a 12-year-old boy dying from infection from an appendicitis because his bandages weren’t changed; etc., etc., etc. Americans are absolutely stupid to think that the socialized medical systems of England and Canada are paragons of care. Instead of applauding Hillary and Edwards, they should be booing them for outing such awful ideas.
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