More people should understand that hospitals are messy.

If you exclude the Cleveland Clinics, Cedar Sinais, Beth Israels & Stanford Meds of the hospital world, most American hospitals are woefully bad for patients, in terms of HAI rates(Hospital Acquired Infections).

Buried in a pile of books, surveys and studies during the passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) a few years ago, was an eminently readable book called

  Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed
  My Father--and How We Can Fix It by David Goldhill. 

Here's an Atlantic piece by Mr. Goldhill

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer...

A Reason TV discussion with him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvSa9nC4JcQ

I think his points are still relevant, even after the passage of the ACA.

In a few years, I am certain that we will have to revisit the issue of how little we get as consumers of healthcare in America, for how much we spend as a nation, all over again.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1327766/Mid-Stafford...

1200 dead because of avoidable cleanliness problems

If anybody has a link for stats comparing local hospitals in the US versus Europe, I would love to read them.

I've had 2 relatives who were submitted to different local hospitals for different things, but they both contracted secondary infections, which nearly killed one of them.

At the end of the day, we should feel lucky that a complete stranger made an honest effort to help you or your loved one in their time of need, and not focus exclusively on the complications and accidents that may have happened along the way.

To anyone who works in healthcare, if you don't already, I would strongly encourage the use of checklists for any and every important task. Checklists save lives. [0]

[0] http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/86/7/08-010708/en/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7825780.stm

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/fall08checklist/

Edit: Typo.

Edit 2: These hospital visits were covered by Canadian healthcare so we didn't have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can see how it would be very difficult to overlook complications and accidents when the bill will likely bankrupt you.

For the first 10 years or so of my working life, my only experience of paperwork was top-down controlling bullshit. Pointless timesheets. Useless reports. Data collected and never looked at again. It was managers imposing mandates in ways that rarely helped the business, and often hurt it.

But in getting into the Lean movement, I came to realize there's another approach. If you are a team that wants to do well, there's only so far you can go on implicit work practices. Eventually variation becomes the biggest barrier to improvement. The solution is to collaboratively create a standard way of getting a job done. With variation minimized, you can then start to rigorously test improvements, increasing quality and reducing waste.

This is easiest to see when you're working solo. A while back I was struggling to go running in the mornings. I was always forgetting something: keys, money, headphones. Now near the door is a simple list I can run down to make sure I have everything. Less stress, less wasted time in the mornings, more runs. I love it.

But groups can do the same thing. Can and should, really. Top-down imposition of quality practices rarely works. The people doing the work are the best ones to create and tune the way a job gets done. Might as well do it before some manager gets a bright idea and inflicts the wrong approach on you.

Now, we see that Western medical workers with education, resources, and the focus of single patients in Western hospitals are catching it. And now I feel like the message is shifting toward something like: "It's impossible for doctors to do their job without a high risk of transmitting Ebola, and even if the protocols work, it's impossible to follow them. But still: Ebola is nothing to worry about, and any significant response is counterproductive panic."

I don't know whether that's what you're saying or not. But I am done hearing about how Ebola is not really a problem[1][2]. We just don't know anywhere near enough to be confident that it won't spread.

Even if you grant that modern rich areas can control it, that still leaves an awful lot of people exposed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8161937 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8429867

Then when you grow older you realise that just like in every aspect of the world, everything is super messy and no one, except for a very few, know what they're doing.

It depends when she became infected though - was it Duncan's first visit or after they admitted him as an Ebola patient? I'm not sure if this has been established yet or if so, can't find a good source.

One thing is for sure, that hospital is going to get the SHIT sued out of it.

Thats why its nice to live in a place that requires HAI (Healthcare Acquired Infections) to be reported. In the state I live in (US/AZ), this is only voluntary for the hospitals. As a patient, it makes it almost impossible to make an educated decision on what facilities to avoid.