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HOW CALIFORNIA WORKS TO NOT IMPROVE PATIENT SAFETY
They say you should learn from your mistakes, and they are right. That’s how growth and development happen. But it is hard, and usually impossible, to learn from your mistakes if you don’t know what they are. So when hospitals fail to report medical errors, or lump all of them together into the nebulous category of “adverse events,” without enough case-specific information to make the reporting useful, improvements in medical care fail to happen.
Yet that is exactly what is taking place in California right now, according to this investigative report from NBC News .
UPDATE, Nov. 25, 2014: Consumer Watchdog has called on CA Gov. Jerry Brown to take action to improve the accuracy of the reporting of medical errors , based on the recent investigation undertaken by a local NBC News station, which made it apparent that state hospitals are vastly underreporting medical errors and the related harm to patients.