Biomedical Professionals at Work

I read this article titled "'Critical error' led to radiation overdoses" from http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1596402006. The article reports that a "mistake made by an inexperienced health worker led to a teenager (Lisa Norris) being given a massive (58% more than prescribed) radiation overdose". This "error" eventually killed the kid. Though this article does not directly relate to the so called break throughs in the medical field, I still find this article interesting in the following ways. The first being the fact that the error was not casued by the stereotypical "bad doctor hand writing" problem. The inexperienced treatment planner, probably an intern entered everything into a computer. The error occur because the health worker wasn't aware of the new updates on the computer system. I'm a news kind of guy and I hear alot about hospitals updating their managment systems to full automatic computer systems to prevent human errors such as bad hand writing. This incident just proves that no matter how amazing automated systems are, there is still the human element in the operation. While computers don't make arithmetic errors, humans are still prone to mistakes. The second aspect of this article that interested me was the fact that the error was discovered not by this intern's mentor but by another more experienced doctor. This again goes back to the humans versus technology theme. I am however more interested in the fact that the mentor didn't catch the mistake. It either means that he/she was not well qauilified ( which I seriously doubt), or that he/she was too busy with other things. While this incident happened in U.K., understaffed hospitals are very relevent issues in the U.S. The ever growing baby boomer generation will put a huge strain on our health care system. Hospital understaffing problem may eventually become the norm, which only opens the door for more accidents. I think this issue can be solved or at least alleviated by limiting the amount of money victims of medical mishaps can sue. I am by no means saying that victim are not entitled to certain compensations, but some lawsuit verdicts are just rediculous. Hospitals need to put their money in hiring new staff than paying off lawsuits. It's actually quite scary to think that we are going to be the ones working in an environment which one mistake can literally mean the end of our career.

Also, has anybody seen the show on Discovery channel about savants? I thought it was very intriging how the savants are mentally disabled and at the same time possess amazing tallents in music and arts. The show went into details on how their brain are different from ours, I thought it was neat to watch a couple of shows on nervons and brain function while I'm also learning it from class.