Courant Calls for National Strategy On Preventable Medical Errors

The Hartford Courant editorializes, "Two recent reports exposed the disgraceful fact that Americans are at risk of dying from preventable medical errors and lapses in treatment when they go to hospitals to get help. It's time that Congress addressed this issue on a national level, instead of letting each state decide to do something -- or not." The paper cited "a report in the New England Journal of Medicine" that "showed that hospitals are not getting safer for patients." Separately, "a study on the Medicare population by the office of the inspector general of Health and Human Services, said that harm -- again, largely due to preventable errors – contributed to prolonging treatment or hospitalizations of 134,000 Medicare patients in one month (about one in seven patients)," the editorial noted.