In early 2007, Carol Hemelgarn's life was forever changed by a failure, a tragic medical

failure. At the time, she was working for Pfizer, the huge US pharmaceutical firm, so she

was familiar with the healthcare system. But what changed her life wasn't a professional

failure. This was personal. My nine-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was diagnosed with leukemia,

ALL, on a Monday afternoon, and she died 10 days later. In this day and age of healthcare,

children don't die of leukemia in nine days. She died for multiple medical errors.

She got a hospital-quired infection, which we know today can be prevented. She was labeled.

And when you attach labels to patients, a bias is formed, and it's often difficult to look beyond

that bias. So one of the failures in my daughter's care is that she was labeled with anxiety.

The young resident treating her never asked myself or her father if she was an anxious child,

and she wasn't. What happens is we treat anxiety, but we don't treat scared, afraid, and frightened.

And that's what my daughter was. Hospitals were frightening places to children.

So my daughter, with her hospital-quired infection, became septic, but they were not treating her

for the sepsis, because all they could focus on is they thought she was anxious, and they kept giving

her drugs for anxiety. Even though the signs, the symptoms, and me as her mother kept telling them

something was wrong, something wasn't right, they wouldn't listen to me. So by the time,

by the time she was failing so poorly in breast surgery and brought back out, there was nothing

they could do for her. The first harm was unintentional that they did to our daughter.

It was all the intentional harms after that, where we were lied to. The medical records were hidden

from us. People were told not to talk to us. And the fact that it took the organization three or

seven months and 28 days to have the first honest conversation with us, those were all intentional harms.

And that's why in healthcare, we have to have transparency, because how many other children

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