Last October, a technician at the children's hospital at Stanford University improperly connected a ventilator hose, accidentally pumping too little oxygen into a 9-day-old infant's lungs.

A month later, technicians at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz unintentionally placed a CT scan of one patient into the electronic file of another, leading physicians to remove the wrong person’s appendix.

Officially called “adverse events,” those accidents are also known as "never events" because they are considered preventable, and many safety experts say they should never happen. California patients are being injured at a rate of about 100 a month, according to data compiled by the state Department of Public Health.

While committing mistakes is human, injuring 100 patients a month is proof of idiocy and unprofessional work. A lot of this is probably a result of the import of cheap labour, as well as a population getting dumber and more reckless. Soon we might want to avoid the hospitals for the sake of health reasons!