Title

"News" piece on a legislative bill that would support a "mandatory reporting" sy

Authors

Lee Burnett

Source

Maine Times

Date

4-4-2002

Pages

7

Abstract

"News" piece on a legislative bill that would support a "mandatory reporting" system for medical errors. Maine's medical community is backing the bill, because it assures that their mistakes won't become newspaper headlines. Medical errors are estimated to kill 200 to 400 Mainers each year. Under the new system, hospitals would be required to report to the state any mistake that leads to death or serious disability. The state would investigate and publish an annual report of so-called "sentinel events," which would attempt to explain what caused them and what is being done to prevent them in the future. But no hospital or practitioner would be named in the report. Impetus for the legislation came from Rebecca Martins of Warren, whose father died of complications from a kidney transplant in 2000, and from the an Institute of Medicine report in 1999 estimating that mistakes kill 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized people each year.

Subjects

Bills, Legislative, Medical errors

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