Erros médicos: por que não notificar?

O blogueiro do The Wall Street Journal repercute matéria do Philadelphia Inquirer sobre a notificação de erros médicos. Alguns estados americanos adotaram a notificação de erros hospitalares. Lá, como cá há um pavor em dizer que há problemas nos processos de trabalho que levam a erros. Prova da estúpida onipotência do setor hospitalar e dos médicos.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey, like several other states, have passed laws in recent years requiring hospitals to report serious errors. But lots of important mistakes may still be going unreported, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports this morning. In New Jersey, for example, five of the state’s 80 hospitals didn’t report any preventable mistakes last year. And some Pennsylvania hospitals didn’t report any errors or near misses, which are also supposed to be reported. It’s unlikely the hospitals operated flawlessly. “I don’t know how many is enough, but zero is a bad number,” said James Bagian, head of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Patient Safety, told the Inquirer. “Anybody that is supposed to report close calls and has zero reports is clueless. … Management is asleep at the switch and just waiting until they kill someone.” The laws are part of a nationwide push to recognize medical errors and improve patient safety by preventing them. But the laws aren’t in step with another big trend in medicine these days: transparency. In general, the error reports aren’t available to the public, and the agencies wouldn’t tell the Inquirer how many error reports each hospital had filed. The New Jersey Hospital Association supports reporting but opposes making the reports public. “It may present an unfair picture of what is actually going on . . . when we have some hospitals that are not reporting and other hospitals that are reporting,” a hospital association official told Inquirer.