Historically, hospitals were intended for the poor who could not afford to have their care delivered privately to them at home --- hospitals were, and are, notorious havens for nasty microbes. Now you know why we, as surgeons, try to boot people out the door as fast as we can --- it's not all about saving money.
As for medical errors, the situation today was best summarized by surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland in a Wall street journal editorial a few years back. He says, correctly, that the increasingly elderly and increasingly obese and unfit population fails to realize that many of them are only alive because they require more maintenance than the space shuttle, maintenance that will fail them if it isn't perfect.
He gave an example of a man with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) who had two bone marrow transplants and survived ten years --- but needed platelet transfusions almost weekly. In total, the man had received tens of thousands of blood products until, one day, he got a mixed up transfusion and died. An error? Sure --- but in another era and another medical system, he'd have been dead six months after diagnosis. Instead of worshipping the medical profession that gave him ten good years of life with a disease which, only a short time ago, was a death sentence, his family cursed them. The error --- one mixup in tens of thousands of transfusions. Moral of the story: if you need ten thousand transfusions to stay alive, a transfusion reaction is probably going to kill you eventually. Unless, of course, your care is given by gods who never err even over tens of thousands of events.
We in the medical profession should strive for perfection, but we see so many people now that are barely alive --- diabetes, vascular disease, end-stage smoker's lungs, arthritis --- many in their 80s and 90s. Such people can not tolerate any flaw in their care, a level of perfection often not humanly attainable.
Consider this scenario: you are pumping gasoline when the machine malfunctions and douses the area in gasoline --- it's the middle of winter and you have to get away from the area without touching off any static electricity. You try, but your arm comes too close to your car and a spark sets the place on fire. Your fault? Technically yes, but you were put in an impossible situation. That's how I felt when confronted with a man with endstage heart and kidney function, 100 pounds overweight and with years of smoking corroding his lungs, who had fallen and had a blood clot in his head. If he dies during anesthesia, it's a "medical error". In reality, it's the outcome of a lifetime of abuse that often puts physicians in an impossible situation.
People have a right to live their lives as well or as badly as they want, and have a right to the same medical care as everyone else. But many "medical errors" are simply the last tiny straw that broke the camel's back.
Fortunatley, I'm supposed to go home the same day. I know what's supposed to be done and I know the routine. I'm familiar with the hospital (patient care good, administration billing etc. not so good).
