enshrine a proactive commitment to safety" in the Canada Health Act.

One death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic," Soviet dictator Josef Stalin famously said. Despite the obvious falsehood of that dictum, it has a certain validity in the field of perception. Consider the 1994 death of Nicole Brown, which held a continent transfixed for more than half a year as her celebrity husband, O. J. Simpson, stood trial for murder.

Against that, a study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal two years ago reported that up to 24,000 Canadians die every year due to medical errors made in hospitals and health clinics. Since that revelation, there's been scarcely a ripple of public discussion.

The deaths, as well as tens of thousands of injuries, are caused by bungled surgeries, mis-diagnoses, drug reactions and other preventable causes, the study said.

Now, a new report commissioned by Health Canada proposes setting up an arm's-length agency, along the lines of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, to look into deaths and other incidents and seek ways to prevent future similar occurrences.

"It's pretty odd," says Dr. Sam Sheps, co-author of the study with Karen Cardiff. "They (hospitals) have whole departments of finance, but I don't see any big departments of safety."


After the CMAJ study was released, Health Canada created the Canadian Patient Safety Institute to come up with answers. The report calling for a national patient safety agency is a product of that endeavour.

What's urgently needed is a safety management culture in health care, Sheps and Cardiff said when their report came out last week.

Although they didn't address the question, physicians' fears of malpractice litigation could be one obstacle to setting up such an agency.

The report makes a compelling case. It points out that an average 60 people a year have died in airplane accidents in Canada every year since 2000, compared to as many as 24,000 from medical error. It appears that our priorities are determined more by our anxieties than by reality.
The report says the government should "enshrine a proactive commitment to safety" in the Canada Health Act.