Dennis Quaid becomes advocate for hospital safety following medical errors

USA Today (4/13, Rubin) reports that according to actor Dennis Quaid, “When a crash happens, it’s so public. … No one is going to fly on their airplanes unless they have that trust.” Yet, “when a mistake occurs in a hospital, the public might never hear about it. Although an estimated 100,000 Americans die each year because of medical errors, their deaths are scattered over thousands of hospitals, ‘where people die anyway,’ Quaid said. ‘It doesn’t get the same type of attention.'” USA Today says that since “Quaid’s 10-day-old twins were twice given an adult dose of the blood thinner heparin,” he “has become the self-described ‘frontman’ for a campaign to improve patient care with the implementation of ‘safe practices’ as simple as hand-washing and the use of technologies such as bar codes to match medications to patients.”