News in brief - Sept. 26, 2011

Hospitals improve on Joint Commission metrics

American hospitals have substantially improved their performance on 22 measures of care quality since 2002, said a Joint Commission report released in September. In 2002, hospitals adhered to evidence-based guidelines 82% of the time. By 2010, the performance rate increased to nearly 97% among the more than 3,000 hospitals accredited by the commission.

On measures of heart attack care, hospitals improved from 87% to 98%, said the commission's 2011 annual report. Progress on measures of pneumonia was even greater, rising from 72% to 95% between 2002 and 2010. Performance on surgical care and pediatric asthma quality metrics improved, the report said. The commission also highlighted hospitals that scored among the top 14% for their performance on the quality metrics. The report is available online (www.jointcommission.org/annualreport.aspx).

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Panel deems 1940s U.S. experiments in Guatemala "unconscionable"

Researchers funded by the U.S. Public Health Service in the 1940s and 1950s exposed about 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, psychiatric patients, soldiers and prostitutes to sexually transmitted diseases without obtaining consent, said a September report published by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

The report is the result of reviewing more than 125,000 pages of research documents from archives around the world. The experiments were first reported in October 2010 by Wellesley College medical historian Susan M. Reverby. Eighty-three of the research subjects died, though the bioethics commission could not determine whether the deaths were due to the experiments, which involved 5,500 Guatemalans.

"The Guatemala experiments involved unconscionable basic violations of ethics, even as judged against the researchers' own recognition of the requirements of the medical ethics of the day," said Amy Gutmann, PhD, chair of the bioethics commission. The report is available at the commission's website (www.bioethics.gov/cms/node/306).

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