Pat Mastors, a patient safety advocate, has written a clever blog post called, “A Few More Minutes with Andy Rooney.” Channeling the curmudgeonly tones of a 60 Minutes commentary, it begins:
I died last week, just a month after I said goodbye to you all from this very desk. I had a long and happy life – well, as happy as a cranky old guy could ever be. 92. Not bad. And gotta say, seeing my Margie, and Walter, and all my old friends again is great.
But then I read what killed me: “serious complications following minor surgery.”
Now what the heck is that?
The blog goes on to have Rooney ask for someone to find out what actually killed him. This has offended some respondents who, blinded by their own biases, think a writer using a celebrity’s death to push for information that could be used to improve care is the same thing as accusing his physicians of negligence or hauling Rooney’s family into court to publicly disclose private details.
Don’t you hate people like that?
OK, that was a cheap Andy Rooney imitation. But as it happens, I did have a phone conversation with Rooney about patient safety. It came right after the Institute of Medicine released its landmark report, To Err is Human, in November, 1999. The appalling toll of medical errors wasn’t exactly a secret back then, but doctors and hospitals had gotten used to publicly tut-tutting about the “price we pay” for medical progress every time a new study came out and then going back to doing exactly what they’d been doing before.
