EYE ON TRUCKING: Deaths caused by hospital errors far outnumber big rig fatalities

By LYNDON FINNEY
The Trucker Staff

3/1/2008

Clearing out the notebook on a couple of key industry issues:

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We had the privilege recently of spending an hour with truckers through an appearance on the Lockridge Report hosted by Evan Lockridge on Sirius Radio Channel 147.

The primary topic was Hours of Service and one caller had an astute observation.

He wanted to know why trucking was probably the most government-regulated industry in the country and he noted a somewhat parallel situation between trucking and the healthcare industry, specifically hospital nurses.

He noted that they often work long hours and there is no government regulation limiting the number of consecutive hours a nurse could be on duty.

We spent some 14 years in the healthcare industry earlier in our career working in public relations and communications for what we consider one of the best healthcare organizations in the U.S. and we knew of numerous occasions when a nurse would be asked to work a double shift, usually meaning that by the end of the second shift the nurse had been on duty for around 16 hours.

Nurses today would probably tell you that the job they do is considerably more difficult today that it was even 10 years ago. Today, because (1) of the advancement of medical technology and (2) the manner in which insurance companies manage their member clients, you have to be really, really, really sick to be an inpatient.

So what’s the difference, the caller wondered, between regulating a truck driver who is handling an 80,000-pound rig that could become a lethal weapon if the driver dozed off, and regulating a nurse who’s been on duty for 14 hours and has to make serious medical judgments such as giving the patient the correct medicine?

After the show, we searched the Internet and found out that somewhere in the neighborhood of 195,000 people die in the United States each year because of preventable medical errors in hospitals.

That’s almost 190,000 more than the number of people who were killed in truck related crashes in 2006.

If fatal hospital errors drew the same attention from public citizen groups as do fatal big rig crashes, perhaps the government might take a look at how to cut down on hospital deaths.

We feel that many of those errors are fatigue-related.

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We received an e-mail from the Department of Transportation recently that directed us to a statement that Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters gave before the Senate Committee of Environment and Public Works in which she touched on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission’s recent report.

If you recall, Peters and two other commissioners differed with the majority on how best to fund the transportation infrastructure.

She mentioned the Fiscal Year 2009 budget, which funds the final year of the $286.4 billion SAFETEA-LU authorization.

“It’s clear that we are crawling across the finish line with the Highway Trust Fund’s short term future unclear and its long term future in serious jeopardy,” she noted.

She once again stressed her belief that reliance on an excise tax “increasingly battered by such factors as increased fuel efficiency, higher air quality standards and fluctuating foreign oil prices” was not the best way to fund improvements.

“Given the severity of our transportation challenges and the effect on our economy and quality of life, it is imperative that we strive to reach a bipartisan consensus on the nature of these challenges,” she told the senators.

The statement got us to wondering: where do the four remaining presidential hopeful stand on transportation?

So we visited the Web sites of Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. John McCain and Mike Huckabee. Each has an “Issues” menus.

As of the middle of February, only Huckabee’s site mentioned anything even remotely substantive about transportation, and that mention is more about creating new jobs by building new highways rather than rebuilding the infrastructure to improve the movement of commerce throughout the U.S.

So apparently someone’s not getting the message at the highest levels.

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A quick reminder:

The Mid-America Trucking Show is less than one month away so we suggest if you’re planning to go, you get yourself and your family registered at www.truckingshow.com.

There’s no place like Louisville, Ky., in late March and this year’s show promises to be the largest ever with the addition of a North Wing and renovation of the East Wing at the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center.