TALK ABOUT
MEDICAL EXPERIENCES

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We're glad you stopped to visit the web site of Talk About Medical Experiences (T.A.M.E.).  

If you feel helpless and have no one to turn to because of your negative "medical experience", we want to help you in exercising your patient rights and privileges.  We are an advocacy and educational organization with a vested interest in helping you understand patient rights and more.  T.A.M.E. will diligently and confidentially advocate on your behalf and assist you with your medical experience.  Patient safety, as it relates to the delivery of healthcare services, medical mistakes, and accountability
from providers, is a growing concern and must be talked about to bring about improved safety and effective change throughout our healthcare system.

Double click to watch these staggering numbers of medical mistakes as reported by ABC News Anchor, Diane Sawyer, April 2011.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=evh8oHO8KKU&list=SL
 

Nationally, the Harvard Medical Practice Study estimated that, each year, more than 180,000 people die at least in part, because of medical mistakes -- these go largely unreported.  Every year thousands of people are injured as a result of medical malpractice.  "The medical imperative is clear: to make health care safe we need to redesign our systems to make errors difficult to commit and create a culture in which the existence of risk is acknowledged and injury prevention is recognized as everyone's responsibility," says the editorial, which was signed by Lucian Leape of Harvard University and five others.

T.A.M.E. is a nonprofit organization that advocates and publicly targets medical errors, discrimination, and abuse in the  medical care delivery system, to the extent that recipients and former recipients of medical care may need assistance to support and protect their rights.  Our fundamental mission is to help empower people who have been victims of medical errors so that they may learn to independently exercise their rights.  We're committed to promoting the rights, protection and advocacy of those who request assistance.  We offer solutions and seek both human and material resources to assist individuals, and have an advisory board consisting of lawyers and doctors for referral of medical malpractice or negligence cases.  T.A.M.E. is engaged in any activity permitted under the laws of
the United States and the District of Columbia through the promotion of educational activities, which result in educational benefit to recipients as designated by the corporation.  Our goal is to advocate, educate and promote fairness and equality in America's healthcare system.
 


As written in the National Patient Safety Foundation, An Educational Needs Assessment for Improving Patient Safety, medical error has emerged as one of the Nation’s most pressing healthcare challenges and a major social policy problem.  In its seminal report entitled, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of preventable medical error.  Even using the lower estimate, medical error is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States — surpassing deaths due to motor vehicle accidents, chronic liver disease, alcohol- and drug-induced causes (combined), and a variety of cancers, including breast, stomach, and prostate.


While staggering, mortality estimates only begin to scratch the surface of the problem as they fail to measure the full range of adverse events resulting in injury but not death.  However it is measured, error is an important benchmark for quality in health care, reflecting the overuse, under-use and misuse of health services.  Particularly in the case of misuse, preventable harm from medical treatment compromises patient safety and may result in injury or death. Variations in services also undermine patient trust in the healthcare system; an essential component of patient-provider communication and delivery of care.  In the end, error prevents health care from delivering its potential benefits.
 

The social cost of this failure is enormous, estimated to be between $29 and $38 billion per year, with about $17 billion of those costs associated with preventable errors.  The IOM emphasized that most of the medical errors committed are systems errors, not attributable to individual misconduct or negligence.