Hightower Lowdown

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations recently issued its second alert in three years on surgery mistakes. “Surgery” and “mistakes” are not two words you want to hear in the same sentence. But last year, the number of reported mistakes was more than triple the number in 1995, when the Commission first began counting. More than three-fourths of these errors involved surgeons operating on the wrong body part.

Holy Hippocrates! What’s going on here? A big part of the problem seems to be the get-’em-in-and-get-’em-out approach that’s been implemented by the insurance giants and HMOs. To these corporate giants, it’s not the quality of care that counts, but volume — and patients have become so many medical “units” to be sped through the system.

The Joint Commission notes that more than half of the surgical errors involved outpatient operations in which people go under the knife and are sent home on the same day.

So who does the system blame? Us patients! The director of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons says that people need to speak up more and not be intimidated by doctors. “A well-informed patient who is an active participant in their health care is going to have a better result,” he says.

How about well-informed doctors? Better yet, how about a system that treats patients as more than just slabs of meat rolling down an assembly line quicker than a doctor can say: “Now which leg is it?”