There was a raft of answers, all wrong.

So I provided a clue: There are thousands of Canadians waiting anxiously to get into this place.

This was the only clue necessary to stimulate the correct answer: a Canadian hospital.

Not surprising, when headlines such as "Baby among 233 killed by drug pump failures" or "Man dies after wrong drug administered" or "Patient dies, nine ill in superbug outbreak" appear almost daily. One of our group cited a more personal story of a friend who nearly died because an operating instrument was sewn inside him.

Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) statistics show that as many as 24,000 people die each year from avoidable events like surgical errors, wrong medications and hospital-acquired infections.

Over the past year or so, drug resistant superbugs in major hospitals spread by dirty rooms and lax medical practitioner hygiene have run rampant. A recent Auditor General's report estimated that one of every nine patients admitted to a Canadian hospital will become infected. Listening to hospital administrators doesn't exactly inspire hope. A televised response from the head of a Montreal hospital where patients died due to a particularly nasty C. difficile outbreak stated that he would "try harder" to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands between patients. And a B.C. regional health authority recently spent $130,000 on a campaign to "remind" staff about the importance of hand washing.

Try? Remind? If you were running an airline would you "try" to get the ground crew to properly service the aircraft, or "remind" the pilots to go through the final checklist just before they pushed the throttles forward? Of course not. You would require adherence to standardized safety procedures on a zero-tolerance basis.

Every time we fly in an airplane, we are relying on a very low likelihood of losing our lives due to, using the terminology of the CIHI, "avoidable events." When an air crash occurs, there is a huge public focus, and a great effort by investigators to determine the root cause. If the cause is found to be poor maintenance, inadequate training or failure to follow prescribed procedures, there are major consequences at all levels in the company, as well as for the shareholders.

Yet, every day in our country, preventable mistakes are made in our operating rooms, hospital wards and nursing homes. The cumulative death toll numbers in the thousands per month.

While a single fatal failure in private industry gets great public attention, only a small portion of medical mistakes even get reported. Many times, the mistake dies with the patient. How can Canadians find this acceptable?

It's a mystery to me but I am certain that no Canadian CEO would keep his job and no private company could stay in business if its defects rate was even a small percentage of that in our government-run health care system.

And that brings me to another mystery.

How can Canadians continue to accept the myth that private sector participation in our health care system is a dangerous thing? How dangerous is it to consume food from a private sector grocery store supplied from private sector agriculture? How dangerous is driving a car manufactured by the private sector, or sleeping in a high rise built by the private sector?

Perhaps I should turn the question around: How secure should we feel if all of the above were done by government?

The key reasons for the vastly superior safety record of the private sector are standardized quality systems that are enforced, transparent incident reporting and full accountability to customers and regulators.

Just as doctors are not very good at healing themselves, a government-run health care system in not good at regulating itself.

The answer is to separate both the funder and the regulator from the deliverer. There is no reason that publicly funded health care couldn't be delivered by private sector firms whose contractual obligations include vastly improved quality systems and accountability standards.

Clearly, tragic mistakes are taking thousands of lives and permanently ruining many more. We hear the usual excuses: short-staffing, inadequate funding, mistakes happen.

How long would the public tolerate these same excuses if private sector mistakes were taking so many lives?

Would private sector health delivery mean no fatal errors? Of course not, but the private sector has experience in applying international process and behavioural standards to achieve the highest-quality results humanly possible.

And speaking of humanly possible, I have great respect for the dedication and hard work of our health care workers. I have two sisters and a niece who are nurses and I have seen first-hand how hard they and their colleagues try to do their best in a chaotic and dysfunctional environment. Only a whole new approach will allow our health care workers to achieve the quality of which they are truly capable.

The next time a loved one lies in a hospital room or on the operating table, do we want the quality and safety standards to be as good as on our next airline flight?

When I'm anxiously pacing the waiting room, I know what my answer is.

Gwyn Morgan is the retired founding CEO of EnCana Corp. His column appears every other Monday in the ROB.

This article was originally written for and published by The Globe & Mail on April 16,2007. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Morgan and the Globe and Mail for giving us permission to reproduce it here for the benefit of our readers.

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