January 13, 2004 BOSTON (AP) -- A decade after a Boston Globe columnist died from an overdose of chemotherapy, state health officials Monday announced the creation of a center devoted to patient safety.
The Betsy Lehman Center for Patient Safety and Medical Error Prevention will educate doctors, patients and their families about medical errors and coordinate safety programs to try to prevent such mistakes.
Health officials announced a series of other initiatives, including the establishment of an ombudsman on patient safety.
The center is operating on $200,000 that came from the nationwide tobacco settlement.
Betsy Lehman died in 1994 at age 39 after she received four times as much chemotherapy as she was supposed to get. She was being treated at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for breast cancer.
Ann Lehman Katz called the center an appropriate way of celebrating her sister's life.
"She was a very strong advocate of education and responsibility-taking in health," Lehman Katz said. "If a center such as this had been created in her lifetime, she would have been here to cover it."
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
