In just a matter of days, Sorrel King went from planning a welcome home party for her young daughter, to planning her funeral instead. But out of this tragedy, a mother has become a passionate, national patient safety advocate so no other family suffers the same kind of loss.
Sorrel told her emotional story to a packed room of advocates, nurses, and public health professionals at HCFA on Tuesday. Her daughter Josie had been admitted to a PICU after suffering serious burns from scalding water. After some time, she was improving and getting ready to go home. Suddenly, she took a turn for the worse and went into cardiac arrest after being given methadone despite being severely dehydrated.
Sorrel spoke about the many points when something could have been done to prevent her daughter’s death, including the multiple times she expressed her concerns about her daughters worsening health. Those concerns were not taken into account by her medical providers and addressed. These breakdowns in systems and communications resulted in her daughter’s death.
Finding her way through her grief, Sorrel founded the Josie King Foundation. Its mission is to improve safety in hospitals. One of the projects of the Foundation is to foster the creation of rapid response teams that can be activated by patients and family members in addition to medical staff. This project is called Condition H. It was the Condition H program that gave HCFA and the Consumer Health Quality Council the incentive to advocate that all hospitals in Massachusetts have rapid response systems in place.
Chapter 305, signed into law in August of 2008, includes this requirement. Massachusetts is the first state in the country to require rapid response methods in all hospitals. And it is stories like Josie’s that demonstrate the need for all hospitals to allow patients and family members to activate a rapid response when needed. Sorrel believes her daughter would be alive today if she could have activated a rapid response team when she saw her daughter’s condition deteriorating.
She has recently written a book called “Josie’s Story.” Learn more about the work of the Foundation and about the book at www.josieking.org. Sorrel tells Josie’s story in the hope that it will encourage hospitals to improve patient safety. Members of the Consumer Health Quality Council also tell their stories in the hope that they can make a difference in the quality of care provided in Massachusetts.
If you have a story to tell, then you can help to make a difference. Contact Deb Wachenheim at dwachenheim@hcfama.org to learn more about the Consumer Health Quality Council and how your story can help to improve health care.
Sorrel’s story and life is amazing. I highly recommend that you buy Sorrel King’s book ”Josie’s Story” to read the tragic yet inspiring story of a mother who accomplished so much arising out of the death of her daughter due to a medical error. (The proceeds from the book benefit the Foundation.) I could not put it down. It was not only that it was inspirational and compelling, but that it gave voice to all of those who have been afflicted so terribly by medical errors. As a trial attorney who represents these victims, and one who considers himself first and foremost a patient advocate, I have been screaming into the wind about these problems for years. Sorrel King has a magaphone and is getting the medical community to listen.