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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (May 10, 2000)
environment free of to 3 S t u q interruptions illiil acquaintance rape lllllll! to not have your property damaged to a room of vomit and chaos Speak up to your Q Speak up to your living in your on the New View 2000 Ffice of Student Life on Errors continued from page 1 thing is going to save lives, it’s not always done,” Hibbard said. Hibbard and the other panel members are charged with devel oping the National Quality Re port, which will evaluate the health care delivery system and recommend measures to improve the quality. “There isn’t anything more im portant than taking care of peo ple,” said Michael Cook, a mem ber of the forum’s board of directors. “There is evidence that there are breakdowns that could be avoided.” Although the panel is still map ping out its study strategies, the group has committed to complet ing the report, mandated by Con gress, by 2003. The experts will examine the effectiveness of hospital systems, which are not always held ac countable for incorrect proce dures. As a possible solution, the { C There is evidence that there are breakdowns that could be avoided. Michael Cook Quality Forum board member panel will look at the successful organization of the airline indus try’s system. After crashes, airline agencies immediately develop safeguards to try to prevent the same types of incidents again, Hi bbard said. “We need to develop systems that find where the errors happen and study them,” she said. Additionally, the forum will try to make the industry more consis tent across the country. For exam ple, Cook said effective medical practices in Oregon should also be used in South Carolina. “We must find out how to con vert existing knowledge that will raise the performance at all lev els,” Cook said. Another goal of the forum is to find a way to provide health insur ance for more people. Approxi mately 44 million people in the United States are not medically in sured, according*to the Institute of Medicine, a supporter of the Na tional Health Care Quality Forum. “We’re not very good at provid ing access to our population,” said Hibbard, who received her doctorate degree in 1982 from the University of California at Berke ley. For the project, Hibbard is trav eling to Washington, D.C., about once every two weeks, an ex hausting yet vital schedule to keep. “It’s complex but really impor tant for people to understand at least the broader issues,” Hibbard said. “My hope is that people will pay attention to this because a lot of important decisions could be made.” Hibbard was selected for the panel because of her work to help the public better understand op tions in health care. “She’s done some really ground-breaking research on how to talk to consumers about (med ical care) and the choices they make,” Rother said. “She is really the leader on how to communi cate to consumers.” As a whole, the panel includes some of the finest health care ex perts in the country, Rother said. “All of the major stake holders are on the board,” Hibbard said. “The hope is that there is some agreement on what to report to consumers.”
