The news (Trial Court Order Forcing Disclosure of Quality Assurance Materials Appealed) about the hospital lobby in Illinois (Chicago is home to the Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Hospitals that conducts “sentinel event reporting” on licensed hospitals nationally) filing a brief to block patient safety reports led me into my archives.
I have written before about my experience challenging Hospitals’ assertions of the peer review privilege to block access to their record of medical errors during patient care.
My efforts to force disclosure of these records in The Estate of Thomas versus Lee Memorial are the subject of three entries labeled “Overdose” and culminated in this post – Overdose 3.
In our case, Charles versus Baptist Hospital, we obtained a Supreme Court ruling forcing disclosure of “peer review” records that I wrote about here.
The false premise that secrecy encourages patient safety measures at any level of hospital administration is a myth that should not be allowed to persist. Medical error continues to contribute to an unacceptable level of mortality in health care and there isn’t anything happening in these secret proceedings to curtail or limit the deaths and injuries. More transparency can only help.
