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A man the FBI said appeared to be in his 70s and walking with a cane robbed a bank this morning in north suburban Niles.
A man who is estimated to be in his 70s robbed the Harris Bank branch at 7077 W. Dempster St. at 9:45 a.m., according to FBI spokesman Joan Hyde.
The robber was wearing a brown coat and walked with a cane during the incident, she said.
He did not show a weapon and no one was hurt, according to Hyde.
Niles police were not available immediately.
chicagobreaking@tribune.com
DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran‘s English-language Press TV channel has been dropped from the satellite platform that allowed it to broadcast in the United States and Canada, the channel said.
The state-owned, 24-hour network broadcasts world news and pro-government views beyond Iran’s borders.
Press TV had broadcast in North America on the Galaxy 19 satellite platform. The channel did not say when it was dropped.
New sanctions announced by the U.S. Treasury Department this week blacklisted the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) and its director, Ezatollah Zarghami, which oversees Iran’s broadcast channels.
Press TV said in a statement on Friday evening that its being dropped from Galaxy 19 was a “flagrant violation of freedom of speech.”
In October, the Paris-based Eutelsat, one of Europe’s leading satellite providers, cut Iranian state television and radio broadcasts to comply with tougher European Union sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
The Eutelsat decision hit 19 channels provided by IRIB, including Press TV.
Galaxy 19 is operated by Luxembourg-based Intelsat, according to the firm’s website. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The European Union stepped up sanctions on Iran’s banking, shipping, and industrial sectors on Monday over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program which the West fears is aimed at producing nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the charge.
(Reporting By Yeganeh Torbati; Editing by Rosalind Russell)
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.
The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.
Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.
A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.
Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.
No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.
Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.
While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.
Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.
Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”
In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.
Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.
“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.
About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.
Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.
Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”
Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”
Because a brand embedded in our subconsciousness can find a space in our garage, the Impala endures.
About 16 million Chevys named for an African antelope have hit the road since 1958. And even though the one you recently returned to the airport rental lot bore little resemblance the one whose "giddy-up" the Beach Boys sang of a half-century ago, General Motors is betting the bloodline still can claim hearts.
A revamped 10th-generation 2014 model is now on display at the just-opened 105th Chicago Auto Show as a prelude to its dealership debut in a few weeks, a bid to re-establish its good name.
"It's always been a great brand name," Russ Clark, director of Chevrolet marketing, said alongside one of the made-over Impalas on the Auto Show floor at McCormick Place. "In fact, when we did research on the name, we found Impala is one of the strongest in terms of consideration and favorable opinion of any name in the industry. A lot of that is heritage. A lot of it is the fact that people say, 'I know people who have had them, and everybody loved them.'"
The brand has been ubiquitous for decades, even if you don't remember the Beach Boys immortalizing the vintage growl of a "four-speed dual-quad Posi-Traction 409" or how Robert Blake's 1970s TV tough guy Baretta drove a rusted-out Impala from '66, the era when Chevrolet could move about 1 million Impala sedans and station wagons a year. My own first car was a four-door V-8 '72 Impala, a powerful and roomy hand-me-down whose weather-beaten body — like the brand's identity — clearly had seen better days by the late '70s and early '80s.
More recent Impalas have hardly been the stuff of song, and it's hard to imagine them inspiring nostalgia. They've been too dully utilitarian to be iconic.
Nonetheless, although sales have slowed, it has been the overall best-seller among big sedans. Three-quarters of those sales have been as fleet vehicles for corporate salespeople, government agencies and rental companies. That means the premium has been on space, reliability and keeping costs down rather than the kind of panache and extras that might foster pride of ownership.
The goal of this Impala overhaul in both four- and six-cylinder iterations — drafting on similar nameplate revivals for models such as Ford's Taurus, Dodge's Charger and Chrysler's 300 — is to flip that 75-25 ratio of fleet sales to retail on its head.
"It makes perfectly good sense on General Motors' part to finally put some style back in the Impala," auto industry analyst Art Spinella, president of CNW Research, explained. "If you have a great brand name, to almost toss it off, treat it as an orphan and send it off to the fleet sales department with bland styling and cheap interiors, that's a disgrace. What they've done is kind of salvage themselves with this.
"It's finally dawned on General Motors that you can sell a consumer car to fleets, but you can't sell a fleet car to consumers. You always keep fleet cars (looking) relatively obscure and you keep the price way down, and that's what General Motors had been doing for years to keep the (Impala sales) volume up. Now they're taking another look. I don't think they've necessarily gone far enough, but it's a step in the right direction."
To wander through the vast Auto Show, which runs through Feb. 18, is to be reminded of how deeply many of us connect to vehicles, starting as children playing with toy trucks and cars. There's a teenage rite of passage when car keys and a license expand the world. Certain makes and models mesh with what played on their radios, the places traveled in them, the stage of life they marked.
That emotional bond doesn't form so easily with a mere box with wheels.
"What was it that made us fall in love with cars in the first place?" Henrik Fisker, executive chairman and co-founder of high-end hybrid carmaker Fisker Automotive, asked the crowd at Thursday's Economic Club of Chicago luncheon. "It struck me that most of us, when we really start to get our heart pumping about cars, it's usually not the cars of today. It's usually the cars of the '50s and '60s."
Road salt, slush and rain were my old '72 Impala's kryptonite. In time, its front bench seat reclined like a La-Z-Boy whenever I hit the gas because the floor beneath had rusted through. Whatever my affection for the vehicle, I could see the road we were on — literally and figuratively — both looking ahead and glancing down.
Thirty years after I traded it in for a sporty red Pontiac with seats that reclined only how and when I wanted, I would not have expected my old flame to generate much heat.
Carmakers, like most marketers, know that even when a brand is disconnected from what it once represented, it still can resonate. The new Impala is neither the muscular car of old nor the generic conveyance of late. Yet Impala means something to would-be buyers, and good or bad, it gives them something to measure this latest version against.
"They have equity in the name and you never get rid of a brand that has a good reputation," Spinella said. "Some people will buy it because it's an Impala. Some people won't. But they'll look at it because it's an Impala and they remember the Impala. It's easier to reintroduce a name than to introduce a name nobody knows."
I can still remember driving around with my friends with no particular place to go, a song on the radio about a horse with no name. If there was a tune about a nameless car, I don't recall it.
philrosenthal@tribune.com
Twitter @phil_rosenthal
CAPTIONS
Hadiya Pendleton wake
Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, center, arrives at the visitation for her 15-year-old daughter Hadiya Pendleton at Calahan Funeral Home located at 7030 S. Halsted St. in Chicago (Terrence Antonio James, Chicago Tribune /February 8, 2013)
Hadiya’s body lay in an open casket, dressed in a purple dress embellished with sparkles. The inside of the casket was lined in a soft purple.
Dozens of bouquets of flowers lined the room and a large photo of Hadiya was hung on display. A small TV played a picture slideshow of Hadiya smiling with family and friends.
John Burdette, a Hyde Park resident, said although he didn't know the Pendleton family, he wanted to pay his condolences.
“It helped put me at ease,” said Burdette, 64. "This poor young lady. Things are nuts out there and it's terrible. I don't leave my house after 4 p.m.”
Media trucks and police cars lined Halsted Street outside the funeral home, as Hadiya's death has garnered much attention on both a local and national scale.
The wake is scheduled from 2 to 9 p.m. Friday with the funeral to follow Saturday morning. First lady Michelle Obama is scheduled to attend.bdoyle@tribune.com
The Challenge: Can you solve the mystery of a middle-aged man recovering from a serious illness who suddenly becomes frightened and confused?
Every month the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to sift through a difficult case and solve a diagnostic riddle. Below you will find a summary of a case involving a 55-year-old man well on his way to recovering from a series of illnesses when he suddenly becomes confused and paranoid. I will provide you with the main medical notes, labs and imaging results available to the doctor who made the diagnosis.
The first reader to figure out this case will get a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” along with the satisfaction of knowing you solved a case of Sherlockian complexity. Good luck.
The Presenting Problem:
A 55-year-old man who is recovering from a devastating injury in a rehabilitation facility suddenly becomes confused, frightened and paranoid.
The Patient’s Story:
The patient, who was recovering from a terrible injury and was too weak to walk, had been found on the floor of his room at the extended care facility, raving that there were people out to get him. He was taken to the emergency room at the Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment. Doctors thought his delirium was caused by the infection, but after 24 hours, despite receiving the appropriate antibiotics, the patient remained disoriented and frightened.
A Sister’s Visit:
The man’s sister came to visit him on his second day in the hospital. As she walked into the room she was immediately struck by her brother’s distress.
“Get me out of here!” the man shouted from his hospital bed. “They are coming to get me. I gotta get out of here!”
His brown eyes darted from side to side as if searching for his would-be attackers. His arms and legs shook with fear. He looked terrified.
For the past few months, the man had been in and out of the hospital, but he had been getting better — at least he had been improving the last time his sister saw him, the week before. She hurried into the bustling hallway and found a nurse. “What the hell is going on with my brother?” she demanded.
A Long Series of Illnesses:
Three months earlier, the patient had been admitted to that same hospital with delirium tremens. After years of alcohol abuse, he had suddenly stopped drinking a couple of days before, and his body was wracked by the sudden loss of the chemical he had become addicted to. He’d spent an entire week in the hospital but finally recovered. He was sent home, but he didn’t stay there for long.
The following week, when his sister hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she forced her way into his home. There she found him, unconscious, in the basement, at the bottom of his staircase. He had fallen, and it looked as if he may have been there for two, possibly three, days. He was close to death. Indeed, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart had stopped. Rapid action by the E.M.T.’s brought his heart back to life, and he made it to the hospital.
There the extent of the damage became clear. The man’s kidneys had stopped working, and his body chemistry was completely out of whack. He had a severe concussion. And he’d had a heart attack.
He remained in the intensive care unit for nearly three weeks, and in the hospital another two weeks. Even after these weeks of care and recovery, the toll of his injury was terrible. His kidneys were not working, so he required dialysis three times a week. He had needed a machine to help him breathe for so long that he now had to get oxygen through a hole that had been cut into his throat. His arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them, and because he was unable even to swallow, he had to be fed through a tube that went directly into his stomach.
Finally, after five weeks in the hospital, he was well enough to be moved to a short-term rehabilitation hospital to complete the long road to recovery. But he was still far from healthy. The laughing, swaggering, Harley-riding man his sister had known until that terrible fall seemed a distant memory, though she saw that he was slowly getting better. He had even started to smile and make jokes. He was confident, he had told her, that with a lot of hard work he could get back to normal. So was she; she knew he was tough.
Back to the Hospital:
The patient had been at the rehab facility for just over two weeks when the staff noticed a sudden change in him. He had stopped smiling and was no longer making jokes. Instead, he talked about people that no one else could see. And he was worried that they wanted to harm him. When he remained confused for a second day, they sent him to the emergency room.
You can see the records from that E.R. visit here.
The man told the E.R. doctor that he knew he was having hallucinations. He thought they had started when he had begun taking a pill to help him sleep a couple of days earlier. It seemed a reasonable explanation, since the medication was known to cause delirium in some people. The hospital psychiatrist took him off that medication and sent him back to rehab that evening with a different sleeping pill.
Back to the Hospital, Again:
Two days later, the patient was back in the emergency room. He was still seeing things that weren’t there, but now he was quite confused as well. He knew his name but couldn’t remember what day or month it was, or even what year. And he had no idea where he was, or where he had just come from.
When the medical team saw the patient after he had been admitted, he was unable to provide any useful medical history. His medical records outlined his earlier hospitalizations, and records from the nursing home filled in additional details. The patient had a history of high blood pressure, depression and alcoholism. He was on a long list of medications. And he had been confused for the past several days.
On examination, he had no fever, although a couple of hours earlier his temperature had been 100.0 degrees. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was sky high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his reflexes were very brisk. Indeed, when his ankle was flexed suddenly, it continued to jerk back and forth on its own three or four times before stopping, a phenomenon known as clonus.
His labs were unchanged from the previous visit except for his urine, which showed signs of a serious infection. A CT scan of the brain was unremarkable, as was a chest X-ray. He was started on an intravenous antibiotic to treat the infection. The thinking was that perhaps the infection was causing the patient’s confusion.
You can see the notes from that second hospital visit here.
His sister had come to visit him the next day, when he was as confused as he had ever been. He was now trembling all over and looked scared to death, terrified. He was certain he was being pursued.
That is when she confronted the nurse, demanding to know what was going on with her brother. The nurse didn’t know. No one did. His urinary tract infection was being treated with antibiotics, but he continued to have a rapid heart rate and elevated blood pressure, along with terrifying hallucinations.
Solving the Mystery:
Can you figure out why this man was so confused and tremulous? I have provided you with all the data available to the doctor who made the diagnosis. The case is not easy — that is why it is here. I’ll post the answer on Friday.
Friday Feb. 8 4:13 p.m. | Updated Thanks for all your responses. You can read about the winner at “Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient Solved.”
Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the comments section
Correction: The patient’s eyes were brown, not blue.
S&C Electric Co. said the outage, which lasted for more than 30 minutes at Sunday's game, happened when the demand for Superdome power exceeding a "trip setting" for its electrical relay.
S&C wouldn't go into more details, but the power provider for Sunday's game was Entergy New Orleans, a unit of Entergy Corp.
In a statement, Entergy said the relay device had functioned properly at other high-profile sporting events, including the Sugar Bowl.
The relay was designed to prevent an outage if a cable connection to the stadium failed.
"S&C continues to work with all those involved to get the system back online, and our customers can continue to rely on the quality and performance of our products," Spokesman Michael Edmonds said in a statement.
S&C equipment is commonly used where high reliability is critical, he said, including data centers for United Parcel Service Inc., drug manufacturing centers and hospitals. The company also works with other stadiums throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Entergy said in a statement that the Superdome relay has been removed and replacement equipment is being examined.
That statement came before a special meeting of the New Orleans City Council's Utility Committee Friday morning to discuss the root cause of the outage.
Immediately after the game, Entergy indicated its equipment was functional and the problem must have come from the Superdome, but later said it was launching an investigation to determine the source of the problem.
"While some further analysis remains, we believe we have identified and remedied the cause of the power outage and regret the interruption that occurred during what was a showcase event for the city and state," Entergy New Orleans President and CEO Charles Rice said.
sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel
The unusual agreement is sure to fuel the fight among heirs of Urooj Khan over his estate, once estimated at about $2 million.
The agreement means that Khan’s widow, Shabana Ansari, owns half of the dry cleaning business and its real estate, instead of those assets being divided among heirs in probate court, according to Ansari’s lawyer, Al-Haroon Husain.
Those business assets are worth more than $1 million, leaving only about $680,000 – including the $425,000 in lottery winnings -- to be split among Khan’s heirs, Husain contends.
“It’s a bit unusual,” Husain said of the agreement following a hearing Thursday in the Daley Center courthouse. “I just think he wanted to make sure his wife had a business and had attachment to the commercial property if something happened to him.”
Khan and his partner, Shakir Mohammed, a childhood friend from their native India, signed the agreement early last May, according to court documents. Khan, 46, won the lottery prize later in May and died suddenly in mid-July before he collected the check.
Husain said he didn’t believe Khan “thought he’d be passing away so soon thereafter.”
In addition to the business agreement, Khan had signed a real estate contract with his wife that entitles her to sole ownership of their Rogers Park home, which is valued at almost half a million dollars, Husain said.
Based on those changes, Husain filed amended papers Thursday in court, drastically lowering the value of Khan’s estate to the $680,000 figure, down from about $2 million a few weeks ago.
Khan's family has been fighting in probate court over his estate since his unexpected death at 46. His brother, Imtiaz, raised concerns that since Khan left no will, his 17-year-old daughter from a previous marriage would not get "her fair share" of the inheritance. Khan and Ansari did not have children together.
As the Tribune first revealed last month, the Cook County medical examiner's office initially ruled that Khan died from hardening of the arteries after no signs of trauma were found on his body and a preliminary blood test did not raise any questions.
But the investigation was reopened about a week later after a relative raised concerns that Khan may have been poisoned.
Chicago police became involved in September after further testing found cyanide in Khan's blood. By late November, more comprehensive testing showed lethal levels of the toxic chemical, leading the medical examiner's office to declare his death a homicide.
Last month authorities exhumed Khan's body in order to perform an autopsy and gather additional evidence for the homicide investigation. No results have been made public yet.
While a motive for Khan’s homicide has not been determined, police have not ruled out that he was killed because of his lottery win, a law enforcement source has told the Tribune.
Ansari has been questioned by Chicago police detectives in her husband’s death, but she has denied any wrongdoing.
jmeisner@tribune.com
jgorner@tribune.com
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Grammy performers have been told to cover up at Sunday’s big music awards show, and keep their buttocks, nipples and genitals under wraps. Their politics can’t show either.
In a “wardrobe advisory,” broadcaster CBS also asked musicians and audience members likely to appear on camera at the February 10 Grammy Awards ceremony to avoid wearing brand names on T-shirts as well as clothing with political or activist slogans.
“Please be sure that buttocks and female breasts are adequately covered. Thong type costumes are problematic. Please avoid exposing bare flesh under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack,” said the memo issued by CBS standards and practices department and obtained by entertainment industry website Deadline.com on Wednesday.
“Obscenity or partially seen obscenity on wardrobe is unacceptable for broadcast,” the note added.
The warning follows a lengthy court battle over indecency and obscenity standards on U.S. network television.
CBS, a unit of CBS Corp, was fined $ 550,000 by the Federal Communications Commission for airing a glimpse of Janet Jackson‘s breast when her costume slipped while singing at the Super Bowl half-time show in 2004.
The fine was later thrown out and that decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2012. CBS has expressed “deep regret” for the incident.
The annual Grammy Awards ceremony honors the best musicians of the year, but is also a major promotional showcase for rising stars and upcoming albums.
In 2010, singer Pink performed upside down in a flesh-colored bodysuit, while Rihanna last year wore a plunging black dress on the red carpet.
Performers at Sunday’s three-hour show in Los Angeles include Rihanna, Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5, Frank Ocean, Alicia Keys and Elton John.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News
I did not think I would ever see another “morbidity and mortality” conference in which senior doctors publicly attacked their younger colleagues for making medical errors. These types of heated meetings were commonplace when I was a medical student but have largely been abandoned.
Yet here they were again on “Monday Mornings,” a new medical drama on the TNT network, based on a novel by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent and one of the executive producers of the show. Such screaming matches may make for good television, but it is useful to review why new strategies have emerged for dealing with medical mistakes.
So-called M&M conferences emerged in the early 20th century as a way for physicians to review cases that had either surprising outcomes or had somehow gone wrong. Although the format varied among institutions and departments, surgery M&Ms were especially known for their confrontations, as more experienced surgeons often browbeat younger doctors into admitting their errors and promising to never make them again.
Such conferences were generally closed door — that is, attended only by physicians. Errors were a private matter not to be shared with other hospital staff, let alone patients and families.
But in the late 1970s, a sociology graduate student named Charles L. Bosk gained access to the surgery department at the University of Chicago. His resultant 1979 book, “Forgive and Remember,” was one of the earliest public discussions of how the medical profession addressed its mistakes.
Dr. Bosk developed a helpful terminology. Technical and judgment errors by surgeons could be forgiven, but only if they were remembered and subsequently prevented by those who committed them. Normative errors, which called into question the moral character of the culprit, were unacceptable and potentially jeopardized careers.
Although Dr. Bosk’s book was more observational than proscriptive, his depiction of M&M conferences was disturbing. I remember attending a urology M&M as a medical student in which several senior physicians berated a very well-meaning and competent intern for a perceived mistake. The intern seemed to take it very well, but my fellow students and I were shaken by the event, asking how such hostility could be conducive to learning.
There were lots of angry accusations in the surgical M&Ms in the pilot episode of “Monday Mornings.” In one case, a senior doctor excoriated a colleague who had given Tylenol to a woman with hip pain who turned out to have cancer. “You allowed metastatic cancer to run amok for four months!” he screamed.
If this was what Dr. Bosk would have called a judgment error, the next case raised moral issues. A neurosurgeon had operated on a boy’s brain tumor without doing a complete family history, which would have revealed a disorder of blood clotting. The boy bled to death on the operating table. “The boy died,” announced the head surgeon, “because of a doctor’s arrogance.”
In one respect, it is good to see that the doctors in charge were so concerned. But as the study of medical errors expanded in the 1990s, researchers found that the likelihood of being blamed led physicians to conceal their errors. Meanwhile, although doctors who attended such conferences might indeed not make the exact same mistakes that had been discussed, it was far from clear that M&Ms were the best way to address the larger problem of medical errors, which, according to a 1999 study, killed close to 100,000 Americans annually.
Eventually, experts recommended a “systems approach” to medical errors, similar to what had been developed by the airline industry. The idea was to look at the root causes of errors and to devise systems to prevent them. Was there a way, for example, to ensure that the woman with the hip problem would return to medical care when the Tylenol did not help? Or could operations not be allowed to occur until a complete family history was in the chart? Increasingly, hospitals have put in systems, such as preoperative checklists and computer warnings, that successfully prevent medical errors.
Another key component of the systems approach is to reduce the emphasis on blame. Even the best doctors make mistakes. Impugning them publicly — or even privately — can make them clam up. But if errors are seen as resulting from inadequate systems, physicians and other health professionals should be more willing to speak up.
Of course, the systems approach is not perfect. Studies continue to show that physicians conceal their mistakes. And elaborate systems for preventing errors can at times interfere with getting things done in the hospital.
Finally, it is important not to entirely remove the issue of responsibility. Sad to say, there still are physicians who are careless and others who are arrogant. Even if today’s M&M conferences rarely involve screaming, supervising physicians need to let such colleagues know that these types of behaviors are unacceptable.
