AMA Disputes President on Preventing Medical Errors
NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: The nation's doctors are not giving their support to the president's plan to reduce deadly hospital errors. But they are supporting a plan to track the errors. CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is here with more on this vote today.</s>ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Medical errors are -- have become a very big problem in this country. A report by the Institute of Medicine says that errors made in hospitals kill as many as 98,000 people a year. So in February, President Clinton proposed a mandatory reporting system. Hospitals would be required to report a mistake that killed someone or caused serious injury. The goal: to cut the number of medical errors in half within five years. And today, the nation's largest organization of doctors failed to say one way or another what they think of Clinton's plan. At its annual House of Delegates meeting, the AMA passed a resolution supporting the advancement of some type of system to track errors, but the group didn't specify whether the system should be voluntary or mandatory. One of the AMA's concern is that some states already have mandatory reporting and it simply hasn't worked because doctors and nurses are scared of the consequences, so they don't report when something goes wrong.</s>DR. NANCY DICKEY, AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSN.: The issue is not mandatory or voluntary, the issue may not even be reporting. The issue needs to be: What do we have to change so that the system makes fewer errors? and if data collection is part of that, how do we do collect data in a fashion that enhances the process, rather than diminishes it?</s>COHEN: So Natalie, the bottom line here is that the AMA is very powerful and they didn't do anything today to help President Clinton's proposal go through.</s>ALLEN: Have they spelled out why they think that doctors shouldn't have to report these mistakes, that it shouldn't be mandatory?</s>COHEN: Yes, what they feel is that in hospitals, errors usually are not the result of one person's mistake. For example, if a surgeon injects someone with wrong medicine and the person dies, you might say: Well, it's the surgeon's fault. Well, the nurse handed the surgeon the syringe, and maybe the nurse grabbed the wrong syringe. But then again, the pharmacist prepared that tray for the nurse, and so maybe the pharmacist mislabeled the syringes. So it's what's called "systems errors" rather than personal errors, in most cases it's a systems error, not a personal error.</s>ALLEN: All right, so you are patient at the hospital, you're vulnerable, is there anything you can do to assure your safety, that there are no mistakes?</s>COHEN: Right, exactly, because when you're a patient in a hospital, you are really -- you're just there, they're doing these things to you and you really don't -- you really often don't know what's going on. So what the AMA suggests is they say: ask questions. Don't be afraid to ask questions and if you're going to be too sick to ask questions, then you need to find someone to come with you who is hopefully very smart and can ask lots of questions too.</s>ALLEN: Elizabeth Cohen, thanks.