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This Won't Hurt A Bit: Call for Disclosure of Medical Mistakes

By Amanda Raus

| Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009 | Updated 7:14 AM EDT

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This Won't Hurt A Bit: Call for Disclosure of Medical Mistakes

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This won't hurt a bit. Hospitals are under the knife of Richard Blumenthal.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says it's time to beef up legislation that deals with medical mistakes. The state says some of those mistakes have led to at least 50 deaths.

"What's needed is a sweeping and stringent set of reforms to require more disclosure, greater transparency, more effective and frequent investigations and certainly more reporting," said Blumenthal.

The call for action comes after St. Francis Hospital was put on probation for a year after the death of a patient. The Hartford Courant reported a pump used during the patient's heart procedure failed. The state said the hospital used the device again three or four days later without having it inspected. St. Francis did express its sympathy to the patient's family and says it has taken aggressive action to correct its procedures.

"Those failures deserve to be disclosed so that the public can make informed decisions about where they go for care," said Blumenthal.

He wants everything laid out on the table and all reports made public. That would go for any wrong-doing by a hospital including wrong site surgeries, medication mix-ups and mistakes that lead to patients' deaths.

"The same kind of sunshine that we're putting on hospital infections, we need to do [this] with all adverse events as it will make the public better informed, better health care consumers, and it will provide people with the knowledge they need," said Jean Rexford, the Executive Director of the Connecticut Center for Patient Safety.

Blumenthal is also calling for increased civil penalties so that the hospitals are held accountable for their actions.