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VA aims to reduce med errors
Posted
6-5-2000 New York. The Department of Veterans Affairs is trying to make it safer for health care workers to voluntarily report medical errors without fear of retribution. In doing so, it hopes to raise the level of patient safety at its 172 veterans hospitals. Last week, the VA announced an agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the brains behind the Federal Aviation Administration system’s confidential safety reporting system. NASA will use the Aviation Safety Reporting System as a starting point for developing and implementing a confidential patient safety reporting system for the VA. The Institute of Medicine last year found that medical errors result in the deaths of as many as 98,000 people each year in U.S. hospitals, and that more than 7,000 people die each year in the United States due to medication errors. The VA’s three-year, $8.2 million initiative tackles the medical errors problem in a way that addresses providers’ concerns of legal liability. Under the proposed system, health care workers would report any medical errors observed on the job. NASA would contact those individuals for any additional information, then strip the data of any identifying information before it is entered in the database. According to a summary of the agreement provided by the VA, the parties have agreed that neither the VA nor NASA will use "any report submitted for inclusion" in the system or any information derived from those reports "for use in any disciplinary or other adverse action." "Furthermore," the agreement said, the "VA may not review any report or data until is has been appropriately de-identified." The legal liability issue has surfaced as a major concern among provider groups in their quest to improve medical errors reporting. In April, the Catholic Health Association of the United States said that it would support a national, mandatory medical error reporting system, but only if certain conditions to protect providers from legal liability are met. The American Hospital Association, which favors a less regulatory, private-sector approach, shares that concern.
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