2007-06-28-MedicalMetric

Using metric exclusively is a huge safety benefit. The Mayo Clinic recently changed to be exclusively metric and encouraging all our medical centers to do the same will save a lot of pain (and lost lives) caused by conversion errors.

Here's the letter I wrote to El Camino Medical, PAMF and Sutter Health (the links go to their contact pages so you too can contact them and encourage them to support metrication).

I am currently looking for a new primary care physician and am considering using your facility. Due to previous issues with dosing errors caused by mix ups between US customary and metric, I have a strong preference for facilities that use metric exclusively. What are your current plans for exclusively using metric in your facilities?

Doing all medical measurements in metric exclusively is widely considered best practice and many medical centers and practices do so as it reduces measurement errors and eliminates conversion errors caused by using two measuring systems.

Both the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and the Institute for Safe Medical Practices (ISMP) strongly recommend using metric exclusively. Recently, the Mayo Clinic changed it's policy to use exclusively metric within it's facilities for patient safety reasons (see http://mhs.mayo.edu/mhs/live/page.cfm?pp=locations/news.cfm&orgid=AMC⊂=AMC%20goes%20metric%20for%20patient%20safety%0D%0A&nav=No ) and I would like to see the same from your facility as I believe exclusive use of metric measures is the safest way to conduct a medical practice.

Apart from the obvious safety benefits, there are other benefits such as being able to calculate BMI directly from your height and weight rather than having to memorize a conversion factor. This benefits patients by allowing them to better understand what they're calculating and having more meaning to your calculations makes them more usable. It also removes the effect of patients never quite knowing which measuring system is going to be used and not being able to relate measurements done using different systems.

Regards,
Paul

If you want to join the discussion on this, I encourage you to go to the forum page on this topic