Slashdot Mirror
Look-Alike Tubes Lead To Hospital Deaths
Hugh Pickens writes "In hospitals around the country, nurses connect and disconnect interchangeable clear plastic tubing sticking out of patients' bodies to deliver or extract medicine, nutrition, fluids, gases or blood — sometimes with deadly consequences. Tubes intended to inflate blood-pressure cuffs have been connected to intravenous lines leading to deadly air embolisms, intravenous fluids have been connected to tubes intended to deliver oxygen, leading to suffocation, and in 2006 a nurse at in Wisconsin mistakenly put a spinal anesthetic into a vein, killing 16-year-old who was giving birth. 'Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake,' says Nancy Pratt, a vocal advocate for changing the system. Critics say the tubing problem, which has gone on for decades, is an example of how the FDA fails to protect the public. 'FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die,' says Dr. Robert Smith."
This reminds me of the sort of problem that Michael Cohen addressed in a slightly different medical context (winning a MacArthur Foundation grant) a few years ago.
>Is it convention to use all clear, indistinguishable tubes? Yes.
The problem with your argument is that it is completely false. It is not at all a convention to use "all clear, indistinguishable tubes". IV tubing is clear. A nasal cannula for oxygen is maybe a little similar, but larger, more flexible, and (most importantly) uses a completely different Christmas-tree-type connector instead of a Luer adaptor. Nasal feeding tubes are similar in size to IV tubing, but are opaque and white. And so forth...
These devices really do look quite a bit different. Errors like this probably occur once in several thousand times they are used, and it is very hard to reduce "rare events" to "zero events". Nonetheless, the health care industry is highly sensitized to issues like this, and there has been a huge push to enact safeguards to make it even harder for such errors to occur.
Do you even work in health care or any direct knowledge of what you are talking about? (I'm a surgeon). It doesn't seem like it.
It is really telling that the Slashdot crowd mods something to "+5, Insightful" when the post is so factually clueless. I cringe whenever I see something related to medicine get discussed on Slashdot, because we invariably wind up with a bunch of smart IT guys giving opinions about things that they know very little about.