Carole Hemmelgarn
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Carole Hemmelgarn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 2: Life and Death (Update) · 14 May 2025
podcast
Hey there, Stephen Dubner. We are replaying a series we made in 2023 called How to Succeed at Failing. This is the second episode. We have updated all facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening. In early 2007, Carol Hemmelgarn's life was forever changed by a failure, a tragic medical failure. At the time, she was working for Pfizer, the huge U.S. pharmaceutical firm.
So she was familiar with the health care system. But what changed her life wasn't a professional failure. This was personal.
My nine-year-old daughter, Alyssa, was diagnosed with leukemia, ALL, on a Monday afternoon, and she died 10 days later. In this day and age of healthcare, children don't die of leukemia in nine days. She died from multiple medical errors. She got a hospital-acquired infection, which we know today can be prevented. She was labeled. And when you attach labels to patients, a bias is formed.
And it's often difficult to look beyond that bias. So one of the failures in my daughter's care is that she was labeled positive. with anxiety. The young resident treating her never asked myself or her father if she was an anxious child, and she wasn't. What happens is we treat anxiety, but we don't treat scared, afraid, and frightened. And that's what my daughter was.
Hospitals are frightening places to children. So my daughter, with her hospital-acquired infection, became septic, but they were not treating her for the sepsis because all they could focus on is they thought she was anxious, and they kept giving her drugs for anxiety.
Even though the signs, the symptoms, and me as her mother kept telling them something was wrong, something wasn't right, they wouldn't listen to me. So by the time... By the time she was failing so poorly and rushed to surgery and brought back out, there was nothing they could do for her. The first harm was unintentional that they did to our daughter.
It was all the intentional harms after that where we were lied to. The medical records were hidden from us. People were told not to talk to us. And the fact that it took the organization three years, seven months, and 28 days to have the first honest conversation with us, those were all intentional harms. And that's why in healthcare, we have to have transparency.
Because how many other children suffered because of the learning that didn't take place?
Hemmelgarn says she filed a claim against the hospital, but she didn't move forward with a lawsuit because of the emotional toll. She ultimately took a different path. In 2021, she co-founded an advocacy group called Patients for Patient Safety U.S. It is aligned with the World Health Organization.
She also runs a master's program at Georgetown University called Clinical Quality, Safety and Leadership.
When harm does reach the patient or family, that is the time to really analyze what happened. And while you never want to harm a patient or family, one of the things you'll hear from patients and families after they have been harmed is they want to make sure that what happened to them or their loved one never happens again.
The example I can give for myself personally is I did go back to the very organization where my daughter died, and I have done work there.
Today on Freakonomics Radio, we continue with our series on failure. In the first episode, we acknowledge that some failure is inevitable. We are, by definition, fallible human beings, each and every one of us. And that failure can be painful.
This week, we focus on the healthcare system, where failure is literally a matter of life or death.
Some organizations felt like they had already achieved the patient safety mission. Others, it wasn't even part of their strategic plan.
And we will learn where on a spectrum to place every failure. From inexcusable.
The story of Carol Hemmelgarn's daughter is tragic, a hospital death caused by something other than the reason the patient was in the hospital. Unfortunately, that type of death is not as rare as you might think. Consider the case of Redonda Vaught, a nurse at Vanderbilt University's medical center.
In 2019, she was prosecuted for having administered the wrong medication to a patient who subsequently died. The patient was a 75-year-old woman who had been admitted to the hospital for a subdural hematoma, or bleeding in the brain. Here is Redonda Vaught testifying at her trial.
The medication that Vaught meant to pull from the Acudos machine was a sedative called Versed. What she mistakenly pulled was a paralytic called Vecuronium. Vecuronium instead of Versed.
Redonda Vaught was convicted of negligent homicide and gross neglect of an impaired adult. Her sentence was three years probation. You might expect a patient safety advocate like Carol Hemmelgarn to celebrate Vought's prosecution, but she doesn't.
Showing 1–20 of 95 · page 1 of 5
Next →