Mary Chris Jaklevic reports for Kaiser Health News on a new patient safety initiative intended to ensure hospitals learn from medical errors. People are calling for a “National Patient Safety Board,” an independent government agency, modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board that helps ensure airline flights are safe. Could such a board improve hospital care and patient safety?
Hospitals were unable to handle the patient load from the COVID-19 pandemic. Many now are hurting significantly financially and experiencing staffing shortages. The open question is how a new safety board would address these mega issues.
There’s now an advisory council established by President Biden that is reviewing the merits of a patient safety board that the President would establish by executive order. There’s also a bill in the US House of Representatives, the National Safety Board Act of 2022, led by Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragan.
The travesty is that, unlike the National Transportation Safety Board, which can investigate and expose all airline issues, the bill in the House protects hospitals in two ways that threaten patient safety. First, it only allows the safety board to look into issues of patient safety with the permission of hospitals and other health care organizations. Second, the bill prevents the safety board from naming the hospitals it investigates.
Make no mistake, hospital visits can be dangerous to your health and well-being. More than one in eight hospitalized people with Medicare were unnecessarily harmed in hospital, according to a report by the Office of the Inspector General of the department of health and human services.
What’s worse is that people do not have the information they need to stay away from hospitals that have serious patient safety issues. Hospitals too often are able to hide their medical errors. They should not be. Moreover, even when hospitals have protections in place, hospitals are often reluctant to report data to national research databases.
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