Dennis Quaid and Discussion of Medical Mistakes on Oprah Tuesday

Dennis Quaid Takes Oprah To Hospital That OD’d His Babies

This might be the first time I’m DVR-ing the Oprah show. Tomorrow, actor Dennis Quaid will talk about the medical errors that nearly killed his twin babies.

For the first time since their twins were given an overdose of blood thinner, Dennis Quaid and his wife have returned to the Los Angeles hospital that administered the drug for an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Harpo Productions said in a release Thursday that Quaid and his wife, Kimberly, wanted to visit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to see what steps have been taken to ensure a similar mistake won’t happen again.

The newborn twins were administered too much Heparin in November 2007. They recovered, and the Quaids settled with the hospital for $750,000 in December.

Here are my earlier posts about the incident:

I hope there’s some good discussion on the show about systemic errors and the need for prevention. How can we prevent this same error from occurring again at other hospitals with other babies? Don’t forget the same error occurred, with fatal effects, in Indianapolis a year earlier:

Lack of Error Proofing Kills 3 Babies

I’ll write more after watching the show this week.

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About LeanBlog.org: Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker in the “lean healthcare” methodology, focused on improving quality and patient safety, improving access, reducing costs, and fully engaging healthcare professionals. He is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus.