END OF YEAR LETTERS

It has been twelve years since my mom, Louise Batz, lost her life unnecessarily and unnaturally because of a preventable medical error. The evening of her routine knee replacement surgery, a preventable medical error occurred because of a miscommunication between hospital staff. She passed away eleven days later. Every day since then, I’ve wondered, “What could I have done differently? What do I wish I’d known that could have helped save her life?”

We have learned so much about communication and preventable medical errors in the hospital in the years since her death and have developed the Batz Guide for Patient Safety so that hopefully no one has to experience the shocking pain of losing a loved one from something so easy to solve.

Since my Mom died, we have been extremely focused on carrying out the vision of the Foundation in everything we do. We have sponsored and lectured at conferences about our work across the country and internationally, met President Bill Clinton and explained our mission and story, translated our guides into multiple languages, developed and the Batz Patient Guide App for the iPad, and begun carrying out research to benefit health literacy. Please take a look at all the work we have done below in our Annual reports.