Our story earlier this week about a patient who was burned during surgery at Abbott Northwestern Hospital was one of the most emailed stories on our web site. After the story was published I got a call from Cathy Reuter, the founder of www.surgicalfire.org. It’s a web site and a organization dedicated to increasing awareness of surgical fires. She said her mother was burned during surgery, and died from complications of that burn. You find her story and others on the web site.

According to a national hospital safety and accreditation organization, there are about 100 surgical fires each year, resulting in up to 20 serious injuries and one or two patient deaths annually. An oxygen-enriched atmosphere was a contributing factor in 74 percent of all cases.

She is a one-woman awareness campaign on surgical fires. She said that her marketing effort consists primarily of magnets that she sells that people all over the world put on her cars. As a result, she said, she’s getting about 7,000 hits a month on her web site. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.