• 01
  • September
    2010

Whether through movies or personal experience, you have likely seen the hospital room scene. A patient is hooked up to machines and has various tubes running in and out of his or her body. Obviously, those tubes are important to patients' health; that is why they are kept in the hospital and hooked up to the equipment.

But when medical tubes are not used correctly, the misuse can lead to serious injury or even death. Safety groups have been pushing for over a decade to improve the medical tubes used on patients in order to reduce the rate of medical errors that often end tragically.

According to medical experts, the health field has tubes that are hooked up to patients for very different reasons. Some are meant for feeding, fluids, oxygen, blood or medication, and they are hooked up to various areas in the body. The fatal problem regarding medical tubes is that the multiple tubes hooked up to patients look alike. As a result, medical professionals too often mix-up patients' tubes and administer something incorrectly, which results in the death of a patient.

A registered nurse from Texas calls the current use of medical tubes in U.S. hospitals "deadly," and the various cases of death caused by medical mistakes related to tubes strongly supports that description. The FDA has recognized the current danger but has only warned hospitals and tube manufacturers about the risks of confusing tubes.

No regulations have been developed that would require manufacturers to make tube systems that would help prevent hospital mistakes in the future. Advocates of the change suggest that tubes meant for different uses be made incompatible with other tubes. A change, however, would likely mean higher costs for manufacturers and hospitals, a reality that is especially daunting in this economy.

Resource

The New York Times: U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients (8/20/2010)