SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio family is using their profound loss to help prevent potentially deadly medical errors.
“I feel like every single life we save honors my mom and honors all the people that die from preventable medical errors each year,” said Laura Townsend.
Townsend’s mother, Louise Batz, died after spending 11 days on life support in 2009.
“I think as a family and a patient, you feel like if I can just make it through the surgery, everything is gonna be OK,” said Townsend.
It’s what happened after Batz’s procedure that became deadly.
During an April night in the hospital, Townsend says she and her family instructed her mother’s medical team only to give her morphine for pain.
Townsend says the nurses asked them to leave the hospital around midnight.
“It turned out that they gave her the morphine, Demerol and a visceral at midnight. My mom went into a respiratory depression and suffered an anoxic brain injury,” Townsend recalled.
Townsend said her mother was not hooked up to any monitoring system and was being checked every four hours.
“They didn’t know how long my mom didn’t have any oxygen going into her brain,” said Townsend.
After the family removed their mother from life support, they vowed to use their loss to make a change.
“That night we wrote the mission for Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation because we didn’t want this to happen to other families,” Townsend said.
In the following years, the foundation has worked to “empower patients, families and healthcare providers to work together as a team.”
The foundation has created guides to help patients and their advocates navigate their care.
Those guides include several tools, such as a place to record all medications and physician names and contact information, a list of questions to ask doctors, and a space to take notes before, during, and after a hospital stay.
“This can always stay in the room, right? And so if you have different shifts of family coming in, they can just read off,” Townsend said.
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The foundation has also developed tailored guides for specific types of patients, based on the type of care they need.
Many of those guides are already in hospital rooms around San Antonio, waiting for the next patient.
“If there’s anything good about preventable medical errors, it’s the fact that it’s got the word ‘preventable,’” said Townsend.
“We’re not waiting for the next brilliant scientist to discover the cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, right? We can do something about it today. You can do something about it today,” she said.
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