I saw Michael Millenson doing Grand Rounds at UCSF last week. Michael, who has been mentioned in THCB a number of times, is a former journalist who has become something of a "bete noir" to organized medicine–or at least would be if they paid him any attention. While the AMA debates not offering care to trial lawyers, Millenson continues to point out the general "Silence" of leading medical organizations on the medical safety issue. The case he discussed at the UCSF Grand Rounds concerned a woman who’d had a double mastectomy for breast cancer that was later found to be a case of wrong identity on the pathology slides. The case was used by trial lawyers responding to Bush’s attacks on them over malpractice caps. Of course the AMA and its political allies have plenty of other human interest stories of counties where there are no obstetricians/brain surgeons/pediatricians because of the cost of malpractice insurance.

However, this fight between the lawyers and the doctors continues to miss the point, which is that we are a long way from achieving widespread use of evidence-based medicine. One little thing that might help is the "signing" of body parts by the surgeon prior to surgery, now as the Washington Post reports it is recommended as standard. I recall that before knee surgery in California at Stanford Hospitals in 1996 I wrote "Not This One" in marker pen on my healthy knee, and that got the admitting nurse very annoyed. At least the medical error debate is now in the open.

What’s not so in the open is the in-hospital infection issue. Millenson suggested last week that a nosocomial infection during on of Cheney’s heart procedures, or (my preference) perhaps during Ashcroft’s recent stay in hospital, would really put that issue on the front burner. (They could of course have a complete and full recovery afterwards!) Maybe not, but he found for me a really vicious example in the UK, where the medical safety debate has been even slower to develop than over here. This one concerns Claire Rayner, who is the British equivalent of Ann Landers. In this interview she hammers on the issue of infections caused by sloppy hygiene in hospitals. Take a read, And before you say it couldn’t happen here, be assured that it is happening here too — unless the IOM is making it all up.

Claire Rayner ascribes the problem to a decrease in standards of nursing care, directly associated with an increase in the number of less-well trained people dealing directly with patients. Interestingly enough Linda Aitken’s academic work has shown that there is a relationship in quality of care and outcomes based on the overall level of nurses’ education in a hospital staff. So Rayner may be on to something there. In any event, the more known about this issue, the better, and whatever Newt Gingrich and anyone named Kennedy say, IT is not a guaranteed standalone fix here. We need a system change.