Dennis Quaid Launches Foundation to Reduce Hospital Errors

Life’s good for Dennis Quaid, whose four-month-old twins recovered from a near-fatal drug overdose late last year. Dennis and his wife Kimberley are enjoying bonding with the now healthy babies Thomas Boone and Zoe Grace.

“It’s the greatest thing to hold those kids and see their faces because we had a happy ending,” he said at a recent press conference. “It’s great to be a normal dad with the normal problems of not having enough hands for both of them.”

He said the harrowing ordeal has given him a “greater appreciation of life.

“If they hadn’t made it, it really would have changed my life. But they did survive. So it changed my attitude.”

Last week Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre was fined $25, 000 for administering an adult dose of the blood thinner Heparin to Dennis’ twins and another newborn. The Quaids have also launched a lawsuit against Baxter Healthcare Corp., the makers of Heparin. They claim the firm should have packaged adult and pediatric doses in clearly labeled vials.

The Quaids are also launching a foundation to help reduce the number of medicinal mistakes. Dennis claims human error “is one of the leading causes of death in our country, [greater] than automobile accidents, breast cancer or AIDS.

“Yet because they happen one case at a time, they tend to slip under the public radar unless you’re a celebrity,” he explained. “Because it happened to my family, it was all over the national news. I realized we have an opportunity to raise public awareness about this.”

I’m just so glad it seems some good can come out of this family’s terrible ordeal. Hopefully they can prevent others suffering the same fate.

Image source: Jurvetson @ Flickr