Doctors need to improve patient safety

Doctors need to improve patient safety: "A lthough Measure 35 is ostensibly about reducing injuries from medical care, neither the current system of unrestrained awards nor their capping really addresses meaningful solutions to improving health-care quality and patient safety. While our current system of malpractice rewards is highly flawed, I also take my own profession to task for not acknowledging, let alone remedying, the very real problem of injury suffered in the course of medical care.
Organized medicine can no longer ignore the problem of medical injury. Anywhere from 48,000 to 200,000 people die each year in this country because of medical errors, according to studies from a number of well-respected research organizations. These deaths not only come from a small number of 'bad apple' practitioners but also from the rest of the health-care system that lacks tools to detect and prevent errors that are used routinely by virtually all other industries. "