Monitoring Medical Mistakes

Did you happen to see 60 Minutes last night? Actor Dennis Quaid and his wife Kimberly shared the story of their newborn twins and how they nearly died because of a medical mistake. “It’s bigger than AIDS. It’s bigger than breast cancer”, said Quaid of medical errors that kill thousands of North Americans every year. It’s a problem that’s rarely spoken about because it’s essentially human error. People aren’t perfect and they make mistakes but those errors can cost lives as it almost did in the case of the Quaid babies.

The infants had been hospitalized for a staph infection. They were accidentally given one-thousand times the recommended dose of the blood thinner Heparin – twice! They essentially started to bleed out.

This does not come as a surprise to me because I am allergic to Heparin, which is the go-to medication for preventing clots after surgery. Try to tell a nurse that you’re allergic to even a normal dose of Heparin and you’ll get a wall of disbelief. I have to repeatedly justify my helpless, potentially fatal reaction to one of the safest and most widely used drugs!

The makers of Heparin have made changes to their packaging because the old containers of adult and child doses were too easy to mix up. But Heparin isn’t the only medication that’s problematic. It just happens to be the one that’s getting a star of Quaid’s celebrity level to call for changes. The Quaids sued the makers of the drug but they’re not suing Cedars Sinai Hospital.

The babies have recovered and the couple is just grateful and want to make sure no one else has to go through what they went through. They’re pushing Cedars Sinai to take the lead in creating awareness and new policies for health care to reduce mistakes. As Quaid explained last night, “I’m grateful for every day because if the twins had died, there wouldn’t have been another happy day.”