Serious business at Telluride East

The Telluride Patient Safety Summer Camp has continued this week, with a new group of students and new residents joining together with the faculty in Maryland. After a full couple of days in the classroom–often characterized by good-hearted banter as well as hard work–the group boarded a bus for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery.  Here, Rosemary Gibson, author of The Wall of Silence and other important works about the health care system, pointed out that the cemetery holds over 300,000 members of the military and their families.  She noted, “The military is very good about keeping track of its members, noting everyone who is wounded or killed.”  The contrast with health care is vivid.  In the US, 400,000 people die from preventable harm in the country’s hospitals, which would require the construction of a new national cemetery every year.  Also, unlike in the military, the victims of medical harm are essentially anonymous.  We don’t always keep track of the individual cases, and often we don’t learn from them.

Rosemary asked the attendees to think about people they had known who had suffered from medical errors and to pay them tribute.  Some spoke out, but all seriously considered her words.  Here are some of the faces of our faculty and participants.