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San Antonio Family Starts a Personal Safety Foundation after a Devastating Loss

By Beth Janicek

A San Antonio family has turned their devastating personal loss into a positive action by creating a patient safety foundation to help others from becoming a victim of medical mistakes.

Louise Batz, a loving mother and grandmother, was 66 years old when she went to the hospital to have knee replacement surgery. After the surgery she was given a combination of pain medications that adversely affected her breathing causing respiratory depression. After several days on life support, she died.

Louise Batz daughter, Laura Batz Townsend said,

'I think we had the false perception that everything was going to be okay because it was a routine knee surgery. It was a combination of medications that made her go into respiratory depression. And that is what ultimately killed my mom.'

The family has created the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation in her name. The foundation published a guide to help patients' families know what question to ask to make sure that a routine hospital stay goes routinely.

According to the foundation's website, there are five doctors in the family. One of them, Charles Holshouser, Louise Batz brother said,

'These events occur to individuals inside a hospital system and so it's under the radar. People are not aware.'

Over 200,000 people die every year from preventable medical errors, and that goes generally unnoticed.

The mission of the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation is to help prevent medical errors by ensuring patients and families have the KNOWLEDGE they need to promote a safe hospital experience for their loved ones. Their dream is to have patient safety guides available at hospitals and doctors' offices so that people facing hospital says don't feel like a stranger in a strange land. The family says that they've gotten a great response from all of the hospital systems in San Antonio.

The Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation is a great organization supporting a relatively unknown problem in the United States. Let's hope that they are successful in getting their patient safety guides into hospitals and that it helps reduce preventable medical errors.

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Beth Janicek

Full post as published by San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer on April 26, 2010 (boomark / email).