Preventable deaths, Poo bank, Waterbirths
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are preventable deaths in hospitals a good measure of the quality of care being offered to patients? It's estimated that there are 12,000 deaths a year in hospitals which could have been avoided, but what does that mean and should we be worried that that number could rise with the NHS under pressure?
Mark Porter visits a 'poo bank' in Portsmouth where donated faecal matter is being frozen and stored for later use in patients with Clostridium difficile or C. diff.
And midwife Mervi Jokinen and our own Margaret McCartney take a look at the evidence for waterbirths. Is giving birth in water less painful? And is it safe?
Producer: Lorna Stewart.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, thank you for listening to this edition of Inside Health. I hope you enjoy it. Coming up today, water births, an increasingly popular choice, but why do national guidelines |
| 0:42.7 | differ on whether women should deliver their babies underwater? And fecal transplants, |
| 0:48.3 | using donor stool from a poo bank to treat persistent cases of the antibiotic-induced infection C. diff. |
| 0:55.0 | It may sound odd, but it's the most effective treatment for what can be a life-threatening problem. |
| 1:00.2 | But that doesn't mean it always appeals to those offered one. |
| 1:03.1 | I looked at her and looked at the nurse who was treating me and we both sort of laughed. |
| 1:09.3 | And I thought, oh, that don't sound too good. |
| 1:13.7 | But, well, if it was going to cure it, then we'll give it a go. |
| 1:18.2 | We'll be meeting the team behind that chap's unusual transplant a bit later. |
| 1:22.9 | But first, how safe are our hospitals? |
| 1:26.0 | Recent research in America suggested that as many as 400,000 Americans die every year due to medical errors, |
| 1:33.3 | and that many of those could have been prevented had their hospital care been better. |
| 1:37.3 | A startling claim, and the research has attracted its fair share of criticism, |
| 1:41.3 | but it makes you wonder what's happening here in the UK, |
| 1:44.9 | particularly given the recent pressures NHS hospitals are under. |
| 1:48.4 | Similar research has been done in this country, and Sir Nick Black, Professor of Health Services, |
| 1:52.9 | at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, was part of the team behind it. |
| 1:56.7 | So, what did he discover? |
| 1:58.0 | Just looking at the hospitals, which accounts for about half the deaths that take place, |
| 2:03.8 | our estimate is about 1 in 25, about 3%, 4% of those deaths could be defined as avoidable |
| 2:13.5 | using the methods that we have developed. |
| 2:15.9 | And those methods are what? |
... |
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