President Clinton Lays Out Plan to Cut Medical Errors in Half Through Mandatory Reporting
LOU WATERS, CNN ANCHOR: Big health news, today. As you may have heard just a few minutes ago, President Clinton has a plan to cut medical errors in half over the next five years. This action is in response to a report that says as many as 98,000 Americans die each year because of medical mistakes, more than are killed in car accidents. Most common error: giving the wrong medicine or the wrong dosage. And as CNN's Elizabeth Cohen now reports, even doctors aren't always able to protect their loved ones.</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Dr. Carol Ley has firsthand experience with potentially-deadly mistakes made in the hospital. Last year, her seven-year-old daughter Jacqueline (ph) broke her elbow. After surgery, she was on a morphine pump and something went terribly wrong.</s>DR. CAROL LEY, PATIENT'S MOTHER: The pump itself was programmed -- was misprogrammed but very difficult to program -- so that it was giving her way, way too much morphine.</s>COHEN: Jacqueline was unconscious from the morphine overdose. Doctor Ley, an internist, discovered the mistake herself in the middle of the night. Nurses helped her revive her daughter. That's exactly the sort of mistake the Clinton administration says should be reported to state governments. Today, the administration urged states to make that kind of reporting mandatory.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This will help us to achieve complimentary goals of, first, accountability to the public, and second, a learning environment for the health care industry.</s>COHEN: Right now, experts say doctors and nurses are afraid to admit mistakes for fear of reprisals. Under the Clinton plan, the names of hospital personnel would not be listed in the reports. Doctor Ley, a member of the board at the national patient safety foundation, supports this.</s>LEY: We need not blame individuals for making mistakes, not blame nurses for misprogramming pumps, but we need to look at the system of health care and how we can change it so that this kind of thing never ever happens to anybody again.</s>COHEN: Experts say this kind of reporting is long overdue. Other high-risk industries have had mandatory reporting for years.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Aviation is 20 times safer today than it was 30 years ago. Health care probably is no safer than it was 30 years ago.</s>COHEN: While patients safety experts applaud President Clinton's initiative, several hospital and physician groups say that they oppose mandatory reporting, saying that a voluntary system would work better -- Lou.</s>WATERS: Elizabeth, something I don't understand: If most of these common errors are giving the wrong medicine and the wrong dosage and you're not going to hold humans responsible, even though mostly human error is responsible for many of these mistakes, who do you hold responsible? Certainly not the machine that was so hard to program?</s>COHEN: Well, it's interesting. Experts say that 95 percent of mistakes are made because -- not really because of human error but because of a combination of things that happen together. For example, let's say you're in operating room, there are two vials of medicine that aren't labeled very clearly. A nurse makes a mistake, hands the wrong syringe to the doctor, the doctor injects the patient, the patient dies, who's fault is that. It's a little bit more murky. Now, if someone comes to the hospital, if a doctor comes to the hospital drunk and does surgery on the wrong leg, clearly he is responsible and needs to be punished, but that's not the nature of most medical errors. Most medical errors are what are called system errors, where there's a faulty system. For example, if a pump if very difficult to program and if the nurse doesn't program it correctly, is she wholly at fault considering that most of us at some point make mistakes at work?</s>WATERS: OK, well, that's a tough one. We'll continue following the story. Elizabeth Cohen.