Debora Hendrickson, the Executive Director of Professional Services at San Francisco area Eden Medical Center, recently penned a fascinating article on preventable medical errors. She listed eleven areas of hospital errors that cause significant harm to patients: wrong site surgery; pressure ulcers; falls; pulmonary embolism; hospital-borne infections; urinary tract infections; ventilator-associated pneumonia; poor control of blood sugar levels; foreign objects remaining in the patient post-surgery; blood incompatibility; medication errors. It would appear that Ms. Hendrickson’s list was in no particular order – otherwise, medication errors would be near the top, rather than at the bottom of the list. The most striking part of the article was the author’s comment that hospital errors that should never happen, “kill the equivalent of one jumbo jet crashing each day.” The revelation is astounding. Any crash of a commercial airliner is considered absolutely unacceptable, while preventable hospital errors that injure and kill patients occur daily with little notice. Eden Medical Center, according to Ms. Hendrickson, has made enormous progress toward preventing medical errors. The progress was made with a concerted and labor-intensive campaign, part of which was to make every hospital employee aware of the causes of errors and methods of prevention. When viewed in the light of Eden Medical Center’s experience, the medical profession and hospital industry as a whole, has far to go toward reducing preventable medical errors that injure and kill.