Delineates a serious problem and sounds a clear call to action.
Despite its alarmist subtitle, a thoughtful analysis of why medical errors happen, with concrete proposals for improving the safety of patients.
Wachter and Shojania (both Medicine/Univ. of California, San Francisco) are deeply involved in patient safety and hospital quality issues. Using dramatic cases from their own experience and from health-care publications and websites, they demonstrate the various ways in which things can and do go wrong. The authors look behind the headlines to examine why medical errors such as wrong-site surgery, procedures performed on the wrong patient, missed diagnoses, and wrong prescriptions happen in operating rooms, emergency rooms, and pharmacies, even in the hands of competent, well-intentioned caregivers. Taking a systemic approach, they look at how root-cause analysis, which has been used by airlines and other industries, can be applied to the problem of patient safety. With increased specialization has come greater fragmentation of patient care, state the authors, who spell out the need for clearer communication among caregivers and stricter protocols for handing off patients. They note, for example, that the computerized systems now used in some hospitals to enter physician orders greatly reduce medication errors at the prescribing and order-filling stage. They also look at the culture of safety within institutions, the importance given to safety issues, how doctors talk to each other about mistakes, how the traditional morbidity and mortality conferences and error-reporting systems function and might be improved, and what might be done to reform the present malpractice system. In their concluding chapters, the authors consider what actions the government, policymakers, and hospital administrators should take to improve patient safety. Most significantly for the reader, they outline steps that patients can take to protect themselves.
Delineates a serious problem and sounds a clear call to action.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-59071-016-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rugged Land
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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