To prevent medical malpractice safety experts push a list of "Safe Practices"

As a medical malpractice lawyer I am pleased to see that at least some people are trying to limit medical malpractice awards by improving safety rather than limiting the amount a victim of malpractice can be awarded by a jury. I learned in college economics that if you want sell less of something then charge more for it. If you want less medical malpractice do not make it less expensive to commit malpractice. By making it expensive to commit medical malpractice people find ways to prevent it.

Laura Landro of the Wall Street Journal reports such an initiative:

Despite years of efforts to fix the nation's error-ridden health-care system, leading safety experts say Americans aren't much safer than they were five years ago -- and too many conflicting safety programs may be part of the problem. Now, a coalition of health-care purchasers, quality groups and government agencies working with the National Quality Forum, the leading government advisory body on health-care quality measurement and standards, have agreed for the first time to endorse a single set of 30 'safe practices' that all hospitals should use to prevent death and injury to patients. The agreement comes after a two-year effort to harmonize the dizzying and often conflicting array of safety guidelines that have sprung up since 2000 in response to the landmark Institute of Medicine report, 'To Err Is Human,' which found that as many as 100,000 patients die each year from medical mistakes."

Laura Landro, Wall Street Journal, 11/1/06 (Subscription Only)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116234626074809703.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal