Medical Mistakes And Ultrasound

My apologies to all.  My family and I have recently moved to a new home.  We are living out of boxes for now, but my industrious wife and child are correcting that issue, though, I still cannot find my scrubs.  I will post this while my dog look's for my scrubs (I gave him a scrub shirt with my scent, he is a blood hound).  This issue I have today is an important one: medical mistakes.  This has haunted medical professionals ever since the practice of medicine was discovered and refined (over 2000 years).  Most lay people think medical mistakes involve wrong medications given to patients.  While that is probably true, other mistake happen.  An example is the wrong knee being replaced with a prosthetic.  Or the wrong blood is given to a patient causing holy YOU know what in the ED.  Ultrasound is becoming the standard of care in such situations like trauma to the chest and abdomen, and line placement both in the ED and in the CCU and ICU.  Insurance companies recognize this and are setting up fee schedules that encourage the use of ultrasound in many instances.  Ultrasound is becoming a wonderful tool both to eliminate errors, and insure that the patient get's the best quality of care at a "Somewhat" affordable rate.  We will yet see what the health care reform does with the wonderful tool we call diagnostic medical ultrasound.  Here is an excerpt and the link.

As a result, many leading hospitals, such as Christiana Care, are using ultrasound guidance to insert central venous lines, since the technique has been shown in several studies to greatly reduce rates of this complication—or even to prevent it entirely—compared to inserting the central catheter needle “blindly.”

Ultrasound at the bedside can also improve diagnostic accuracy and is increasingly used in ERs for the FAST (focused assessment with sonography for trauma) exam, a test to rapidly check trauma patients (such as car crash victims) for signs of internal bleeding. 

Because ultrasound imaging doesn’t expose patients to ionizing radiation, it’s now the preferred diagnostic test for appendicitis in children, as well as checking people of all ages for kidney stones, adds Dr. Sierzenski.

Thank You Lisa Colier Cool and Yahoo

http://health.yahoo.net/experts/dayinhealth/most-common-and-dangerous-medical-mistake