Actor Dennis Quaid, a crusader for patient-safety improvements after his twins were almost killed by an accidental heparin overdose, has found an ally in U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa. http://www.brucebraley.com/free_details.asp?id=1
Braley, who spent 23 years as a trial attorney before turning to politics and going to Congress, participated in the first Oversight and Government Reform hearing where Quaid testified about his newborn twins being given near-fatal heparin overdoses at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 2007. http://www.brucebraley.com/free_details.asp?id=39
If life-and-death issues weren’t at stake here, it would almost be amusing to watch a Federal Drug Administration official squirm as Braley grilled him at the hearing. Braley impressed Quaid so much that at the end of the proceedings, the actor thanked the Iowa lawmaker and said he wished that the lawyer was his Congressman.
During the hearing, Quaid testified that drug companies shouldn’t have “immunity from any liability” – an argument that heparin manufacturer Baxter International is making — just because the drugs they sell have been approved by the FDA. Drug companies should be laughed out of court, the nation’s highest court in fact, for trying to make that argument.
The U.S. Supreme Court has in fact decided to hear a case regarding whether the law preempts suits being filed against drug companies, since their medications have FDA approval, Quaid noted during his testimony in Washington.
Quaid has been everywhere, not only D.C. but “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and medical conferences, to talk about his near-tragic experience and plead for safeguards to reduce potentially lethal medical mistakes. His twins are 2 ½ years now, and appear to be healthy despite their touch-and-go experience at Cedars-Sinai. But the problem regarding mistakes with heparin hasn’t been solved.
In a chat not long ago with The Wall Street Journal, Quaid cited a recent and well-publicized case where a toddler died of a heparin overdose caused by an infusion-pump setting mistake in a Nebraska hospital. http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/04/22/patient-safety-the-movie/tab/print/
Quaid had been scheduled to attend the recent world premiere of his documentary, “Chasing Zero: Winning the War on Healthcare Harm” at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Health Care in Nice, France.
But then Quaid and Dr. Charles Denham, who was in charge of production of the documentary, couldn’t get to the screening because of the disruption of air travel due to the Icelandic volcano eruption, according to The Journal. Only 500 attendees made it, out of an expected crowd of 3,000, because of the travel disaster.
The documentary, which features Quaid, aired on Discovery Channel April 24 and will be repeated Saturday, May 1. After the documentary airs on TV, Denham and Quaid’s recently merged research foundation, TMIT, will hand out copies of it free to all 5,700 U.S. hospitals to spotlight the importance of adopting the safe practices developed by the National Quality Forum, which crafts voluntary safety rules for hospitals, according to The Journal.
There are an estimated 100,000 deaths each year from medical errors and another 100,000 deaths each year from hospital infections, many of then preventable, according to Quaid and his supporters, like Rep. Braley.
The exact number of these deaths is still unknown because a lot of states don’t have a standard or mandatory reporting system for injuries caused my medical mistakes, according to Scientific American magazine. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=deaths-from-avoidable-medical-error-2009-08-10
Let’s see if Rep. Braley helps Quaid make any headway in his quest for patient safety.
