| How many preventable medical errors occur in your local hospital? Research shows 440,000 patients die each year from preventable medical errors. But finding out how safe your local hospital is can be a difficult task. Write to Congress TODAY to fix this problem. Recently, an arm of the federal government called the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it was going to stop tracking and publicly reporting eight egregious medicals errors that included when foreign objects are left in patient’s bodies after surgery and when a patient receives the wrong blood type in a hospital! The good news is that after the USA Today exposed this policy decision and after many patient safety groups weighed-in, the federal government reversed its decision and will now resume reporting these errors. But here’s the deal – there is still a significant lack of transparency when it comes to hospital safety. Currently, there is no simple way for patients to find out the safety record of a hospital. If you agree that we should know how safe our hospitals are, send a message to Congress TODAY! Tell your representatives about the preventable medical error epidemic plaguing this country and urge them to prioritize patient safety and transparency! |
