Dateline Shows How Reluctant Medicine is to Pass On Information

[Guest guest]

I saw a Dateline program last night in which a boy died as a result of an

operating room accident. In the operating room they removed two liquid

medications from their original containers and put them into bowls. The

medications both looked like water. Apparently after being removed from the

original container, they were mixed up and the wrong medication was

administered. The hospital admitted its guilt--but here's the clincher--these

medications didn't have to be removed from the original container. The needle

could have been stuck in the bottles they came in. Would you believe that very

few other hospitals have heard about this and have done nothing to change their

procedure. Here's what Dateline said:

If it’s that simple, that widely known, you might expect every hospital in

America had learned the lesson from Ben Kolb’s death and abandoned that flawed

procedure. But that hasn’t happened.

When Dateline contacted some of the nation’s best hospitals, they all

told us they’re still using the same set-up that martin memorial hospital did,

open cups and all.

Here's a link to the entire show script, called " A Deadly Mistake " :

http://www.msnbc.com/news/657566.asp

My point is that it must be very difficult to pass information around the

medical system. It sounded so much like what we would like to do: Inform medical

personnel that Chiari is quite often a problem and that it should not be passed

off as asymptomatic when people have symptoms.

Suzanne Hill