How Common are Medical Mistakes?
Posted by
Jennifer MooreMarch 16, 2008 8:53 PMHow common are medical mistakes that occur at hospitals across the U.S.? Unfortunately, more common than most of us realize. In an interview with 60 Minutes, Dennis Quaid recounted how his twins almost died due to a medical mistake. The twins almost died last November when nurses at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles mistakenly gave them an adult version of a blood thinner causing a drug overdose. Nurses mistakenly gave the adult version instead of the child version of the drug. Baxter International, the drug manufacturer, packaged the drugs in similar vials and the color and shape were very similar. After three fatalities last year, Baxter issued a safety alert and sent a new peel-off label, but did not recall the old product.
The Quaids are speaking out in hopes that more people learn how common medical mistakes are.
In their case, the nurses administered the wrong drug.
They were supposed to have been given a pediatric blood thinner called Hep-lock to flush out their IV lines and prevent blood clots. But instead, they had been given two doses of Heparin, the adult version of the drug, which is 1,000 times stronger. We all have this inherent thing that we trust doctors and nurses, that they know what they're doing. But this mistake occurred right under our noses, that the nurse didn't bother to look at the dosage on the bottle," Dennis Quaid tells Kroft. "It was ten units that our kids are supposed to get. They got 10,000. And what it did is, it basically turned their blood to the consistency of water, where they had a complete inability to clot. And they were basically bleeding out at that point."
"There was blood oozing out of little blood draws on their feet, and things like that, you know, through band-aids," he adds.
Quaid discussed how 100,000 people a year die as a result of human, medical error ranging from misdiagnosis, medication mistakes to surgical errors.
Quaid calls it a conspiracy of silence, where doctors protect nurses, nurses protect hospitals, insurance companies protect drug manufacturers. Almost no one, he says, is aggressively trying to find ways to eliminate medical mistakes. So the Quaids are in the final stages of launching a foundation they hope will help remedy a situation that almost destroyed their lives.
Since the Quaids' incident, Baxter recalled the product.