Can we still rely on hospitals?

If you are still ignorant about your own health today, I am sorry to tell you that nobody is going to help you keep healthy except yourself. Some will just believe entirely what the doctors say. Some takes the trouble to go understand about health in depth and make their own judgement. I am not saying not to believe the doctors but you should also use your discretion and find more info about what you have heard be it from doctors or from health experts. Below is a news reported on mistakes done in hospitals; gotten from the STAR. I let the report do the talking. Enjoy.

Friday December 4, 2009

Hospital that did operation on wrong kneecap

Compiled by SHABANA FLORENCE, WINNIE YEOH and A. RAMAN

HOSPITALS in Singapore make at least one mistake a week.

Sin Chew Daily reported that statistics released by the island republic’s Health Ministry recently showed that it received 401 cases of reported mistakes in the last seven years.

Its general hospitals made 339 mistakes while the remaining mistakes were made by private hospitals.

Among the cases was a patient who underwent a kneecap replacement surgery and ended up with the wrong one operated on. There were five similar cases in the last four years.

Apart from that, five patients also had gauze left in their bodies after operations.

A recent case saw a doctor giving the wrong chemotherapy dosage to two cancer patients.

The daily reported yesterday that the department had requested hospitals since 2002 to submit such reports without naming the medical personnel responsible for the mistakes.

Hospitals are required to submit their reports weekly and guarantee that they would not commit the same mistake again.

The hospital representatives who fail to submit their reports can be fined about RM4,887 or face a jail term of up to a year or both.

Hospitals also run the risk of having their permits suspended if they repeatedly fail to submit the reports.

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/12/4/nation/5233644&sec=nation