Patient Safety and Ethics

Everyone says health care needs more transparency when it comes to outcomes, but how might that work? And what's holding back efforts to improve care by shining more light on health care outcomes?

Doctors see patients with cases of food poisoning all the time. But patients too rarely bother to report the incidents to their local health department. If they did, we'd all be happier diners.

Are California hospitals doing a better job of preventing serious mistakes in the wake of a state program that issues high-profile penalties for such errors? One reporter finds reasons for doubt in the data.

In 2012, a surgical team mistakenly removed Paul Kibbett’s healthy left kidney rather than the cancerous tumor on the right side. Since then, the hospital has worked to build a culture where reporting mistakes is celebrated.

Journalists can and should hold local hospitals accountable for matching a stated commitment to transparency with concrete actions. It's a difficult job, but here are some ways reporters can get started.

This report was produced as a project for the 2015 California Data Fellowship, a program of the Center for Health Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Other stories in the series include:
Sharpening the focus on medical errors
Do penalties reduce medical errors?

The health news media paid a lot of attention to last week's story about medical errors. But much of the resulting coverage was misleading and failed to scrutinize the underlying evidence.

The Portland Tribune's Peter Korn, a 2009 National Fellow, recently took a look at Oregon residents who've turned to unconventional treatments, and their difficulties in finding doctors who will work them. Korn says this is a story that could be easily localized by reporters elsewhere.

The case of Dr. Reinaldo de los Heros illustrates a troubling tendency for critical information about a physician to go missing. State medical boards could do much more to keep the online paper trail intact over time.

California’s jails were built to hold inmates for relatively short sentences — usually just a few months. But now local law enforcement is grappling with how to hold offenders for long periods of time, which is having an impact on mentally ill inmates.