New data gleaned from a 12 year inquiry into the practices at two "centres of excellence" in the UK showed that children with Down's syndrome were given a lower priority for treatment, and that th ...
Patients are still dying unnecessarily after routine operations, according to the third Report of the National Confidential Enquiry into Perioperative Deaths. ...
Invasive devices such as urinary catheters or intravenous lines increase your chances sevenfold of acquiring an infection, according to a report from Britain's Public Health Laboratory Service. ...
Hospitals should restrict their use of blood transfusions with critically ill patients as this will probably increase their chances of surviving. ...
Encouraging junior doctors to acquire skills by 'practising' on dying patients has been condemned by many physicians in a new US study (BMJ, 2000; 320: 137). ...
Chest radiographs should not be given as routine to patients entering coronary care units, heart specialists have concluded. Specialists at one heart hospital in Birmingham, England have already s ...
Nearly a fifth of operations performed during weekday evenings and 7 per cent of those performed during the daytime and at weekends are performed by unsupervised junior doctors. ...
In WDDTY vol 5 no 4, , we reported that a third of people in Britain are given the wrong blood for transfusion. ...
BLOOD PRESSURE: Check the equipment before you check the patient
First, the bad news. New estimates suggest that more than 2000 people die in UK hospitals every year as a direct result of staff errors. The far worse news is that the figures are wildly conservative, partly because very few hospital staff members...