One Person is One Too Many

Recently the transcrpts of Cardinal Egan’s depositions on the sexual abuse of parishoners  have been made public.  While being deposed, he talked about the statistical insignificance of the numbers of people who had been abused.  I immediately thought about what hospitals say – that the error rate, the occurance of the adverse event, is rare – statistically unimportant. We do not know the real numbers but one is too many.  CT Center for Patient Safety knows the stories behind “one” and it is the attitude that one is  acceptable is the attitude we must fight.  Every time a patient gets an infection at the University of Pennslvania Hospital, the health care team comes together and tries to figure out what happened, what went wrong.  CT hospitals need that same kind of determination.