A Week of Medical Misconnections

[Hat tip to R. Alta Charo, for bring our attention to this] The Wisconsion State Journal is doing a week long series on medical mistakes and the things that can be done to prevent them:

"When nurse Julie Thao put a spinal drug in Jasmine Gant's arm at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison a year ago, the fatal mistake struck many as a freak event.

But Thao's intravenous delivery of an epidural pain medication was an unusually public example of a quiet but dangerous health care problem: tubing misconnections.

At least 1,200 times in the past nine years, U.S. hospital workers have inadvertently given patients solutions meant to flow through one tube -- an IV, an epidural, a feeding tube, a bladder catheter, a blood line -- into another tube, frequently causing harm and sometimes death. The true tally is much greater." To read on, click here.