The Empowered Patient Coalition provides resources enabling patients to take control of their medical treatments.

Read John Novack's interview with Helen Haskell on the Quantros Clinical Cafe website. Helen discusses important patient safety issues including patient-activated rapid response teams, her new videos with Transparent Health and The Empowered Patient Coalition's reporting survey.

Read the interview

The following films from Transparent Learning are the first in a series of educational stories that feature patient safety advocates including Helen Haskell, Rosemary Gibson and Dr. Lucian Leape. Helen Haskell tells “The Story of Lewis Blackman” to share what she has learned in the years since her son’s preventable death with both patients and healthcare providers.

The videos address many critical health care issues including:

1) Prevention of medical errors
2) Disclosure
3) Levels of providers
4) Night and weekend care
5) How providers and institutions respond when our care has caused harm
6) The important role patients and families can take in their care

Please watch a video about Diana Brookins, capturing a true story through a play about a mother's crusade, Kim Sandstrom as she moves forward and fights back about the untimely death of her daughter after surgery. The play, titled Damselfly, premiered at “The Next Decade: National Patient Safety Progress Expo” in Ocala, Florida and was supported by the Empowered Patient Coalition, Mother’s Against Medical Error, Rasmussen College, Munroe Regional Medical Center and the Ocala/Marion County Visitor’s Bureau.

http://www.ocala.com/article/20100312/VIDEO/3122000

We're continuing a tradition at THCB started last year. Asking you to take a moment this weekend to discuss your desires for how to live the end of your life as meaningfully as possible--If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here

Matthew Holt

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes. It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family. Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

Our thanks to the Hearst Corporation and Hearst newspapers for their insightful and cutting edge reporting on medical errors. Please visit the website at http://www.chron.com/deadbymistake/.  And read the Dead by Mistake blog and leave your comments at http://blogs.chron.com/deadbymistake/.

The reporters and editors involved in this story consider bringing the plague of medical errors to the attention of their readers a “public service” and so do we. The media plays an important role in educating consumers about the potential dangers in our medical system and helps us make our voices heard in health care reform efforts.

“Dead by Mistake” shares many heart wrenching and compelling personal stories. Helen and I are all too familiar with these kinds of stories because we hear them on a regular basis from people all over the country. We support mandatory national adverse event reporting and transparency because we need the data and the statistics to identify where problems are occurring. Without these numbers, it becomes impossible to fix what ails our system and patients will continue to pay the price.

My daughter, Katherine Eileen Hallisy, fought cancer five times by the time she was ten years old. As is so often the case, it is the extraordinary strength and profound wisdom of a child touched by hardship that inspires those around her to channel their grief into action.

In October of 1989 our second child, Kate, was diagnosed at five months of age with bilateral retinoblastoma after malignant tumors were discovered in the retina of each eye. Normally, retinoblastoma is a treatable and usually curable type of cancer. The doctors were encouraging and told us optimistically, “If your child has to develop cancer, this is the kind to have.”

Watch Helen Haskell’s video from the Cover America Tour, sponsored by Consumer Reports Health. A Consumer’s Union team travelled across the country videotaping the stories and experiences of real people struggling with health care challenges.

Helen Haskell’s keynote address at the Sixth Annual Quality Colloquium - “The Leading Forum on Patient Safety, Quality Enhancement and Medical Error Reduction.”

See the compelling video of Helen’s personal story from the perspective of a parent who lost a child to medical error. Helen provides a well constructed synopsis of a lethal medication error with a detailed analysis of what went wrong and why.

Helen discusses the concepts of full disclosure, patient’s emotional needs, root causes of errors, patient expectations and the lessons learned from the loss of her son, Lewis Wardlaw Blackman.

View The Full Video Keynote