| VA patient suing after 'wrong site' surgery
In medical parlance, what happened instead was a "wrong site surgery," a category that includes operating on or removing the wrong limb or organ, doing the wrong procedure or treating the wrong patient. The mistake resulted from a series of missteps along the way, a pattern long recognized by safety experts. Errors, they say, seldom are because of a single doctor's or nurse's incompetence or negligence. By its guidelines and those of national hospital regulators, the VA hospital was required to obtain informed consent from the patient for the surgery, mark the operation site and take a "timeout" in the operating room to double-check that doctors were targeting the correct site, doing the right procedure and operating on the right patient. According to Houghton's medical records, all three of these steps appear to have gone awry.
Industry hasn't plugged into technology well enough: Hyro leader
AD AGENCIES and marketing services groups have seriously limited their growth prospects by failing to couple their creative and strategic services with integrated information technology systems, according to a former high-profile adman, Rob Clarke. Mr Clarke, the former chairman of the Advertising Federation of Australia (AFA) and regional head of Leo Burnett and Starcom, said key industry players were now scrambling to promote themselves as having the technical expertise to manage back-end systems for digital communications and commerce, but would struggle for years with the challenge. Mr Clarke returned to the marketing services industry this month as chairman of listed digital services group Hyro. He left the sector in 2002 for executive roles in rugby administration - he was most recently chief operating officer of the Australian Rugby Union -and developed a scathing assessment of the rugby establishment over the past five years.
Mexican bus crash kills 24
MEXICO CITY: Twenty-four people were killed when a bus and tractor-trailer crashed and burst into flames on Saturday in the Mexican state of Chihuahua close to the US border, authorities said.
Eduardo Esparza, spokesman for the state attorney general's office, said 18 others were treated in hospitals for burns after the fire reduced the two vehicles to ashes.
“All of them had burns, some were totally cremated," Esparza said.
Authorities said the victims were take to a morgue in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Family members gave blood samples to help identify bodies.
A police official said most of the dead were passengers on the bus, which slammed into the truck before both vehicles were engulfed by flames.
The official, who asked not to be identified, said the crash may have been caused by excess speed, or possibly because the bus driver fell asleep.
College boosts profile of research in practice
The College of Optometrists has launched the support strategy iPRO (Innovation in Practice Based Research) to encourage and support practice-based research by members within their community practice. iPRO is funded entirely by the College and delivered by the University of Birmingham to expand the network of practitioners undertaking practice-based research, encourage the dissemination of research findings, raise the profile of practice-based research across the profession and provide a source of evidence for policy makers. The range of support services iPRO provides includes practical research advice and mentorship to optometrists, information sources of research advice, training programmes in research methodology, a small grants scheme and a collaborative network for optometrists undertaking primary care optometry research.
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