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Biomedical subjects

H Hiatt

Publications and source records attributed to H Hiatt.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

A shared statement of ethical principles for those who shape and give health care: a working draft from the Tavistock group.

Health care delivery in many countries has expanded over the past 150 years from a largely social service delivered by individual practitioners to an intricate network of services provided by teams of professionals. The problems of increasing resource consumption, financial constraints, complexity, and poor system design that have emerged as consequences of these changes have exacerbated many of the ethical tensions inherent in health care and have created new ones. Many groups of professionals that give and affect health care have established separate codes of ethics for their own disciplines, but no shared code exists that might bring all stakeholders in health care into a more consistent moral framework. A multidisciplinary group therefore recently met at Tavistock Square in London in an effort to prepare such a shared code. The result was not a code but a more basic and generic statement of ethical principles. The intent and hope is that it will offer clear guidance for tough calls in real world settings. It is presented here not as a finished work, but as a draft to elicit comment, critique, suggestions for revision, and, especially, ideas for implementation.

Codes of Ethics↗
PubMed1994

Making medicine more scientific.

Modern biology has far-reaching implications for medicine. But a new type of medical training will be necessary if advances in scientific understanding are to become advances in treatment.

Education, Medical↗
PubMed1991

The nature of adverse events in hospitalized patients. Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study II.

BACKGROUND: In a sample of 30,195 randomly selected hospital records, we identified 1133 patients (3.7 percent) with disabling injuries caused by medical treatment. We report here an analysis of these adverse events and their relation to error, negligence, and disability. METHODS: Two physician-reviewers independently identified the adverse events and evaluated them with respect to negligence, errors in management, and extent of disability. One of the authors classified each event according to type of injury. We tested the significance of differences in rates of negligence and disability among categories with at least 30 adverse events. RESULTS: Drug complications were the most common type of adverse event (19 percent), followed by wound infections (14 percent) and technical complications (13 percent). Nearly half the adverse events (48 percent) were associated with an operation. Adverse events during surgery were less likely to be caused by negligence (17 percent) than nonsurgical ones (37 percent). The proportion of adverse events due to negligence was highest for diagnostic mishaps (75 percent), noninvasive therapeutic mishaps ("errors of omission") (77 percent), and events occurring in the emergency room (70 percent). Errors in management were identified for 58 percent of the adverse events, among which nearly half were attributed to negligence. CONCLUSIONS: Although the prevention of many adverse events must await improvements in medical knowledge, the high proportion that are due to management errors suggests that many others are potentially preventable now. Reducing the incidence of these events will require identifying their causes and developing methods to prevent error or reduce its effects.

Adolescent↗