Adverse Heath Events in Minnesota

Minnesota’s Department of Health issues a regular report on adverse health events occurring to patients in a hospital or ambulatory surgical care setting.  This year’s report was recently released covering October 2022 to October 2023.  For several years before the epidemic and in its first year the number of events reported was around 340 to 360.  Since our population hasn’t changed much, nor has the number of hospitalizations likely changed, on a per capita basis it was pretty stable.  Then in 2021 it soared to 508, to 572 in 2022 and 610 in 2023.  Those are big jumps, and it might be tempting to ascribe them to epidemic turmoil, but 2020 doesn’t fit that pattern.  The top adverse events are pressure ulcers, falls, leaving something inside after a surgery, wrong site surgery (how the hell does that ever happen?), medication errors and doing the wrong procedure (how the hell does that ever happen?).  In fact, these are all easily preventable.  About 40% of these events result in either serious injury or death.  And I suspect that since these are basically self-reports, the state doesn’t hear about everything.     (Mn. Report)

What the report doesn’t talk about is one key reason these events are increasing, particularly given the timing after George Floyd’s overdose death and the subsequent feeding frenzy over DEI hiring.  Recently the UCLA Medical School was in the news for how its DEI efforts have led to a high rate of complete incompetence among students and graduates, with many not even capable of a basic understanding of medicine, but at least their skin color, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or some other irrelevant characteristic is good.  The University of Minnesota medical school is at least as bad and in multiple health care professions we are almost certainly turning out incompetent non-professionals who will do harm to patients.  And hospitals, as other companies have, are hiring anyone who fits the diversity tag, regardless of skills.  And so it would be important to track these adverse events by year of licensure and by those DEI characteristics that are supposedly so crucial to health care.  I have a pretty good idea what it would show, and so even though the Department of Health undoubtedly has that data, they won’t share it without being forced to do so.  And I can assure you that based on the composition of many of the licensing boards, they will do their best to ignore any harms caused to patients by these favored groups, although it gets a little dicey for the racist ideologues when the injured patient is also in a favored group.  Welcome to the new scary world of DEI health care.