Our major success has been what we’ve fought for in raising public awareness with big support by all media over the years. Ongoing exposés continue to highlight error-prone hospitals and their foul-ups. What costs money is not safety but bad safety management. Hospitals are in their own emergency department and don’t know it.
Hospitals — freewheeling, ungoverned and reckless, are in a self-inflicted crisis suffering severe doses of unaccountability. The trusting public gets “Russian roulette” health care systems as a result.
When you can’t get answers or explanations, there is never an end. Understanding stunned loved ones of patients who died but should have lived and patients who survived near misses. For over two decades we’ve read your letters, listened, and talked to you. We understand your devastation and what is needed because we’ve been there and share your fury.
We all must pay our parking fines, but health care providers walk away from deadly neglect because health-o-crats are in denial there are problems in hospital systems they oversee.
Untruthful death certificates hide the catastrophes … no one has the foresight to monitor them. As for the law — what’s left of our rights — it’s just too clumsy and expensive to help and safeguard people.
The Medical Error Action Group has churned out 25 reports and lodged 23 submissions. Conclusion? Health care in Australia can be a pretty slip-shod operation. But who’s listening? Not the people who should be! Or who cares? No one apparently, but us.
Overhaul the system and transform the process for only then will things head in the right direction…
- THERAPEUTIC outcomes …not legal outcomes
- SAFETY first …not secrecy first
- PEOPLE oriented …not claim oriented
- FORWARD looking …not backward looking
- EFFECTIVE …not efficient
- COMMONSENSICAL …not legalistic
- SUCCESS measured by remediation of underlying problem …not by compliance.
