Doing our part to reduce medical errors

Something to think about as we begin a new academic year teaching future health professionals:

Deaths from avoidable medical error more than double in past decade, investigation shows
Katherine Harmon
60-Second Science Blog 10 August 2009

I don't know about you . . . but I sometimes have the chilling thought that I will someday awake from an unconscious state in an emergency room somewhere and one of my former students will be smiling at me and say, "don't worry Kevin, I'll be taking care of you" . . . and it's someone who failed my class because they couldn't tell a femur from a fibula.

So I guess that now's a good time to remind ourselves why we are sometimes as hard-nosed as we are about our students know their stuff (and spelling it correctly). Because someday, they'll be posting things to OUR medical records and they'd better not be typing in perineum when they mean peritoneum!