Patient Safety

Birth control pills are known to be nearly 100 percent effective when taken properly, but a recall of the drugs could send a shudder through women of childbearing age. A manufacturing mix-up by Pfizer Inc., the world's largest drug maker, led to some packets being distributed with the pills out of order. That means a patient could have unknowingly skipped a dose and raised her risk of an accidental pregnancy. Pfizer has recalled about 1 million packets of Lo/Ovral-28 and its generic equivalent, but the company estimates that only about 30 packets were flawed.

Seven Massachusetts hospitals that primarily serve low-income patients will receive up to $628 million over three years to change how they care for patients, with the goal of improving quality and cutting costs, state officials announced Tuesday. The Patrick administration is pushing hospitals to change so that they can focus on keeping patients healthy, rather than on the tests and treatments for which they are paid. But doing that requires investing in improved communication between providers and better monitoring the needs of large groups of patients.

Carney Hospital fired the staff of its adolescent psychiatry unit Thursday, after an investigation into an employee’s alleged sexual assault of a patient uncovered serious patient safety problems. Hospital president Bill Walczak said he hired former attorney general Scott Harshbarger and his law firm a month ago to investigate the assault allegation and conditions on the 14-bed locked unit for extremely troubled teens. When he read Harshbarger’s report Thursday, Walczak said he decided to replace the nurses and other staff on the unit.

A prominent former Las Vegas physician and state medical board member who operated clinics where health officials say patients became infected with hepatitis C in 2007 will face all 28 felony charges filed against him almost two years ago, a state court judge decided Thursday. Having lost a nearly two-year battle to show he is physically and mentally unfit for trial, Dipak Desai sat impassively in the courtroom while Clark County District Court Judge Valerie Adair ruled the grand jury indictment met statutory and constitutional requirements.

Medicare's first public effort to identify hospitals with patient safety problems has pinpointed many prestigious teaching hospitals in Boston and around the nation, raising concerns about quality at these places but also bolstering objections that the government's measurements are skewed. Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both affiliated with Harvard Medical School; and Boston Medical Center, affiliated with Boston University, were among those having substantially more complications than the average hospital, according to data...

Second of two parts On the morning of Jan. 28, 2007, a neighbor looked through Madeline Warner's window and saw her elderly friend passed out in a recliner. Medics rushed Warner to a hospital near her Connecticut home, and a day later she was transferred to UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. Doctors suspected she had had a heart attack, but Warner, 77, suffered from enough medical problems to fill a textbook, including diabetes, kidney disease, asthma, spinal stenosis, chronic back pain, and strokes, according to medical records provided by her family.

Tucked amid the precise language of someone schooled in the subtleties of health care policy is a sentence that showed Mildred Lehman had a personal relationship to her topic when in 2004 she wrote the forward to "The Patient Safety Handbook. " Just after mentioning that 98,000 people die accidentally each year due to medical errors in hospitals, she added a sobering aside: "This aggrieved mother sees in the grim national numbers the sweet young face of a beautiful and talented daughter who left behind two children suddenly bereft.

In fiscal year 2011, acute care hospitals in Massachusetts reported 199 bloodstream infections associated with the use of a "central line" - a tube used to deliver medications and other fluids and take certain cardiovascular measurements. That's a decrease of 25 percent from the 265 infections reported in the prior year. While central line infections were once an accepted side effect, reducing them has become a focus of efforts to improve patient safety. State programs have emphasized both avoiding unnecessary use of central lines and making them safer when they are...

A British medical journal says a worrying number of drug studies are being suppressed by researchers and that the lack of public data could threaten patient safety. One study described by the BMJ journal found the results of fewer than half of drug trials paid for by the U.S. National Institutes for Health were published in a scientific journal within 30 months of being finished. The U.S. agency spends about $3.5 billion sponsoring more than 100,000 clinical trials worldwide.

For years, patient safety experts have been working to reduce the frequency with which patients acquire an infection during a hospital stay or from a medical procedure. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health requires hospitals to report infections related to five categories of surgery. In four of them, state officials say data from recent years show infection rates are below national estimates for 2006-08, the most recent data available. That was not the case with vaginal hysterectomies.

Gabriel H. Teninbaum's commentary on our medical liability initiative of disclosure, apology, and offer misses several key points of the program (" So sorry: The state's new medical apology program is about money, not regret ," Op-ed, May 1). The approach of disclosure, apology, and settlement offer encourages transparency and trust, and gives patients who have been harmed by avoidable events what they tell us they want: full disclosure of the event, assurances that attempts will be made to prevent similar injuries to others, an appropriate apology, and an offer of fair and timely...

Drug maker Novartis is taking legal action in Britain to make state-run hospitals use an eye drug that costs about 700 pounds ($1,130) per shot instead of a cheaper one that costs 60 pounds ($97). In a statement, Novartis said it was calling for a judicial review "as a last resort" because it believed patient safety was being potentially compromised. According to the U.K.'s health watchdog, Novartis' Lucentis is the only drug recommended to treat the eye problem macular degeneration in the country's state-run National Health Service hospitals.

The Globe has pinpointed the best approach in our collective struggle to reduce health care costs: Avoid regulation, encourage efficiency, and let the market decide ("In fight to cut health costs, resist stiffer regulation for now," Editorial, April 17). That is prudent advice in a state where health care is the largest industry and the driving force in our economy. Massachusetts has moved faster and farther than most other states in cost control, with accountable care, global payments, transparency,...

Tucked amid the precise language of someone schooled in the subtleties of health care policy is a sentence that showed Mildred Lehman had a personal relationship to her topic when in 2004 she wrote the forward to "The Patient Safety Handbook. " Just after mentioning that 98,000 people die accidentally each year due to medical errors in hospitals, she added a sobering aside: "This aggrieved mother sees in the grim national numbers the sweet young face of a beautiful and talented daughter who left behind two children suddenly bereft.

In fiscal year 2011, acute care hospitals in Massachusetts reported 199 bloodstream infections associated with the use of a "central line" - a tube used to deliver medications and other fluids and take certain cardiovascular measurements. That's a decrease of 25 percent from the 265 infections reported in the prior year. While central line infections were once an accepted side effect, reducing them has become a focus of efforts to improve patient safety. State programs have emphasized both avoiding unnecessary use of central lines and making them safer when they are...

For years, patient safety experts have been working to reduce the frequency with which patients acquire an infection during a hospital stay or from a medical procedure. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health requires hospitals to report infections related to five categories of surgery. In four of them, state officials say data from recent years show infection rates are below national estimates for 2006-08, the most recent data available. That was not the case with vaginal hysterectomies.

CHICAGO — Patients will be told when they are being treated by rookie doctors, who would get shorter shifts and better supervision under proposed work changes for medical residents. The draft regulations aim to promote patient safety and reduce medical errors by enhancing work conditions for sometimes sleep-deprived junior physicians. The proposal slightly revises regulations adopted seven years ago and would have the biggest effect on interns — new doctors in their first year of residency training programs after graduating from medical school.

Medicare's first public effort to identify hospitals with patient safety problems has pinpointed many prestigious teaching hospitals in Boston and around the nation, raising concerns about quality at these places but also bolstering objections that the government's measurements are skewed. Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, both affiliated with Harvard Medical School; and Boston Medical Center, affiliated with Boston University, were among those having substantially more complications than the average hospital, according to data...