Monday, 10 July 2006
By Sabria S Jawhar
The Saudi Gazette
TO err is human, so goes the saying. But when these errors affect people’s lives, this calls for a serious rethinking. We all agree that doctors and nurses are human beings who may commit mistakes. But the rising number of the reported medical error cases raises several questions. Questions about our health care system and the regulations that govern the medical profession.
We are not maligning doctors and nurses nor asking them to do the impossible. We know that they cannot give life to the dead nor heal the hopeless cases. We also understand that being a doctor simply means doing the best to save lives and minimizing the pain. I am also quite sure that we have a number of doctors that we should all be proud of.
However, recently it has been noticed that the cases of medical errors are either going unnoticed or being overlooked. Even those cases that were reported were either thwarted by bureaucracy at the office of the medical errors committee at the Ministry of Health or killed in the courtroom.
This is not to claim that we are the only country in the world that witnesses medical errors. In the United States, medical errors are ranked as the eighth leading cause of death ahead of traffic accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS. Yet the existing accountability and mandatory reporting system are playing a great role in preventing the reccurrence of such errors. This has made the American health system one of the best in the world.
Even in some of our neighboring countries, such as Lebanon, medical mistakes are highly accountable. Doctors and hospitals there lose their licenses if carelessness is proved.
The compensation in the US system goes up to millions of dollars especially if the medical error is proved to be a result of carelessness or negligence on the part of health care professionals, while in Saudi Arabia it does not exceed SR100,000.
It is true that we don’t want to create panic among the medical professionals. But we have also to be careful not to turn people’s lives into a cheap trade where doctors and hospitals can get away with carelessness.
We don’t want our hospitals to turn into laboratories by asking those who commit mistakes to pay only a handful of riyals that is nothing compared to what they get, while the patients pay the highest price.
For instance, I wonder what would have been done in the US for a doctor, who removed a young woman’s ovary without checking the existence of the other one or without a written permission from her family. What is worse is that he did not even bother to inform her or her family members about his deed. When it was found out by another doctor, and a complaint was lodged, he carelessly said, “I thought you have the other one”.
During the investigation, however, he said that he saw an ovarian cyst and he thought it was a tumor. Have people’s lives become that cheap for such a careless doctor to carry out an operation based on a guess?
Following a year of complaints and regular rounds to the medical errors committee at the ministry of health, a verdict was issued in favor of the woman. However, it was not enough as it simply obliged the doctor to pay the patient a fine of SR30,000.
Was that money enough to compensate the young lady for living without the capability to have children for the rest of her life? Will that money pay for her life-long dependence on hormone injections?
Is it acceptable from a surgeon to forget a towel inside a patient’s tummy to cause his death and get away with it? What compensation will satisfy that patient’s family?
These are only examples of medical mistakes that were reported, but God knows how many were covered up and the institution washed its hands of any responsibility.
Dear Minister, your efforts to develop the heath sector is noticeable. Yet, there is still a lot to do. The concept of coverup pervades our medical establishments. To save peoples’ lives, which is your responsibility, a comprehensive whistleblower protection system must be in place soon. The medical errors committee should be of independent specialists. The public should be actually informed about the risk involved in any medical procedure. Now they are forced to sign papers under the excuse that they are only for routine. Crimes against humanity are committed and covered under those papers just because of people’s ignorance and dependence.
By Sabria S Jawhar
The Saudi Gazette
TO err is human, so goes the saying. But when these errors affect people’s lives, this calls for a serious rethinking. We all agree that doctors and nurses are human beings who may commit mistakes. But the rising number of the reported medical error cases raises several questions. Questions about our health care system and the regulations that govern the medical profession.
We are not maligning doctors and nurses nor asking them to do the impossible. We know that they cannot give life to the dead nor heal the hopeless cases. We also understand that being a doctor simply means doing the best to save lives and minimizing the pain. I am also quite sure that we have a number of doctors that we should all be proud of.
However, recently it has been noticed that the cases of medical errors are either going unnoticed or being overlooked. Even those cases that were reported were either thwarted by bureaucracy at the office of the medical errors committee at the Ministry of Health or killed in the courtroom.
This is not to claim that we are the only country in the world that witnesses medical errors. In the United States, medical errors are ranked as the eighth leading cause of death ahead of traffic accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS. Yet the existing accountability and mandatory reporting system are playing a great role in preventing the reccurrence of such errors. This has made the American health system one of the best in the world.
Even in some of our neighboring countries, such as Lebanon, medical mistakes are highly accountable. Doctors and hospitals there lose their licenses if carelessness is proved.
The compensation in the US system goes up to millions of dollars especially if the medical error is proved to be a result of carelessness or negligence on the part of health care professionals, while in Saudi Arabia it does not exceed SR100,000.
It is true that we don’t want to create panic among the medical professionals. But we have also to be careful not to turn people’s lives into a cheap trade where doctors and hospitals can get away with carelessness.
We don’t want our hospitals to turn into laboratories by asking those who commit mistakes to pay only a handful of riyals that is nothing compared to what they get, while the patients pay the highest price.
For instance, I wonder what would have been done in the US for a doctor, who removed a young woman’s ovary without checking the existence of the other one or without a written permission from her family. What is worse is that he did not even bother to inform her or her family members about his deed. When it was found out by another doctor, and a complaint was lodged, he carelessly said, “I thought you have the other one”.
During the investigation, however, he said that he saw an ovarian cyst and he thought it was a tumor. Have people’s lives become that cheap for such a careless doctor to carry out an operation based on a guess?
Following a year of complaints and regular rounds to the medical errors committee at the ministry of health, a verdict was issued in favor of the woman. However, it was not enough as it simply obliged the doctor to pay the patient a fine of SR30,000.
Was that money enough to compensate the young lady for living without the capability to have children for the rest of her life? Will that money pay for her life-long dependence on hormone injections?
Is it acceptable from a surgeon to forget a towel inside a patient’s tummy to cause his death and get away with it? What compensation will satisfy that patient’s family?
These are only examples of medical mistakes that were reported, but God knows how many were covered up and the institution washed its hands of any responsibility.
Dear Minister, your efforts to develop the heath sector is noticeable. Yet, there is still a lot to do. The concept of coverup pervades our medical establishments. To save peoples’ lives, which is your responsibility, a comprehensive whistleblower protection system must be in place soon. The medical errors committee should be of independent specialists. The public should be actually informed about the risk involved in any medical procedure. Now they are forced to sign papers under the excuse that they are only for routine. Crimes against humanity are committed and covered under those papers just because of people’s ignorance and dependence.
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