Patient death toll worse than 45 plane crashes per year.

Deaths due to medical error are a national disaster - 18,000 dead every year, at least! These are medical statistics, not speculation, compiled from federal government data.

Wrong diagnosis, wrong patient surgery, wrong-site surgery, mix-ups in operating theatres, wrong procedures, wrong medicine, wrong dosage, faulty interpretation of test results, old and contaminated blood products, deadly hospital-acquired infections, equipment sterilisation failures, hit-and-miss hospital care, third world treatment, rogue clinicians... How can anyone let this recklessness continue?

  • FACT #1: Doctors report medical mistakes kill 18,000 Australians, at least, and harm 330,000 every year <1> ...and this is just a minimum number! <2>
  • FACT #2: Aeroplanes are 10,000 times safer to enter than hospitals <3>
  • FACT #3: Our roads are 11 times safer to use than our hospitals. <4>
  • FACT #4: Medical error is a leading cause of death and injury in Australia.

Three ways Medical Error Action Group brings meaning to the death and harm of your loved one ...

Awareness

Our major success has been in raising public awareness due to big support by the media over the years. Ongoing publicity continues to expose error- prone hospitals and their foul-ups. What costs money is not safety but bad safety management. Try getting that message through to health-o-crats.

Compassion

Networking at its most human - giving comfort and advice to survivors and stunned loved ones of patients who died but should have lived. We know what is needed because we've been there and when you need a kindred spirit, we are here to listen.

Action

We all must pay our parking fines, but health care providers walk away from deadly neglect because health-o-crats are in denial mistakes occur. 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.

Hospitals, free-wheeling, ungoverned and reckless, are in a self-inflicted crisis suffering severe doses of unaccountability. The 3 core Medicare funding principles, transparency, probity, accountability, are breached as routine. The trusting public gets a "Russian Roulette" health care system as a result.

We have churned out 18 reports and 14 submissions. Conclusion: Health care in Australia is a pretty slip-shod operation. But who cares? No one but us.

Transform the process to 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, with success measured by remediation of underlying problem not measured by compliance.

References
1 Australian Parliament, June 1995
2 Channel 9 Sunday "Death By Bad Medicine", July 1999
3 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ABC TV Four Corners "Killed By Care", July 2006
4 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1998 Summary