Monitor Doctors Better

 When I picked up the Sunday Sun-Times to see my client, Rosemary Simone, on the front page I immediately knew why she was the “cover girl.”  She and so many others I know were victims of medical negligence: doctors and health care personnel who made terrible mistakes on patients who put their trust in them.
 Simone found her entire life changed because of a doctor who probably shouldn’t have been practicing in the first place.  The Sun-Times’ three-part report on “problem doctors” by Jim Ritter was an informative, objective look at health-care dangers, but patients need to know that these are not isolated instances.
 The Institute of Medicine reported in July that at least 1.5 million Americans are injured or killed every year by medical errors.  It is widely documented that at least 98,000 people die each year in hospitals due to avoidable medical errors.
 Like the Sun-Times points out in its editorial (“Monitoring doctors requires healthy does of care,” Sept. 8), patients need to be proactive in taking charge of their own health care.  But that does not absolve patients, hospitals and other health care personnel from being careful when people’s lives are at stake, people who trusted that these trained individuals will do the right thing.
 Patients also need to know.  The state should set up a clearinghouse to allow doctors’ track records be made public so that people can examine what physicians have done right and done wrong in their professional lives. 
 If the mistakes are as concentrated among a “few bad apples” as the medical profession claims, then it should not be afraid to have this information available to everyone and the notion of “ratting” on one’s colleagues also would be alleviated.