Woke Health Care Is Deadly Health Care

21 deaths and 178 serious injuries due to hospital errors in Minnesota from October 2021 to October 2022. A record total of 572 hospital errors were identified, but not all mistakes are required to be reported, so the number is likely much higher.  That is what a recent report from the state details.  There has been a national effort for multiple decades to reduce health care problems that are actually caused by poor care in hospitals.  Many of these are simply inexcusable and the fixes are usually simple and obvious.  These mistakes simply shouldn’t happen, ever.  They are referred to as “never-events” by quality experts.

Our local butt-wipping material and Dem party subsidiary, the Star Tribune, obviously doesn’t probe too deeply into the causes of this horrific toll.  It runs with the workforce shortage explanation.  But I will tell you there is another problem worming its way through the health care system.  It is the woke insistence on delivering health care through a DEI lens.  So people are being admitted to health care training programs on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnic background and other characteristics that have nothing to do with their ability to learn and deliver good health care.  Candidates with the actual best characteristics for likely success are ignored.  And people are hired on the basis of the same criteria, and retained and promoted.  Poor performance doesn’t matter if your skin is the right color.  And patients are no longer viewed as individuals with unique health statuses and needs, they are grouped by the same largely irrelevant characteristics (there are some situations in which genetic or other factors do vary by race or sex), and equity in care is more important than identifying individual patients needs.  And as usual, the equity result is that everyone gets worse care and ends up with poorer health status.  And many good professionals leave health care or this benighted state because they are fed up with the constant ideological DEI nonsense they increasingly must endure.

The state Department of Health, now run by a racist wokester with no real medical experience, is concerned.  It largely blames epidemic-related shortages in the workforce and over-worked staff.   The hilarious part of the state’s response, according to some news reports, is to claim that lack of “equity” is one cause, instead of an honest appraisal of whether the focus on “equity” is actually leading to a serious decline in the quality of care and a failure to treat patients as individuals.  And how has the legislature responded?  Well they must have known what was coming, because in the last session they eliminated the requirement of doing these annual reports, so this is the last one we will see.  So much for transparency and giving the public important information related to the quality of health care.  (Strib Article)   (State Report)