Hospitals have become less safe during the pandemic. So why does the US government want to suppress hospital safety data?
There’s little question that US hospitals—up against COVID, patient surges, and labor and supply shortages—have become less safe for patients during the pandemic, as preventable events and complications have become more common.
Leaders with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said as much, earlier this year, in an article for the New England Journal of Medicine: “Many indicators make it clear that health care safety has declined,” they wrote, noting, “the fact that the pandemic degraded patient safety so quickly and severely suggests that our health care system lacks a sufficiently resilient safety culture and infrastructure.”
Despite such frank assessments, CMS is now at odds with public safety advocates about whether to make some of the hospital-specific data behind those trends publicly available.
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Source: Fortune, 14 June 2022