200,000 Americans Killed Each Year in Hospitals by Medical Error
David Gutierrez, March 02, 2010
According to "Dead By Mistake," a report detailing the findings
of an investigation by the Hearst Corporation, approximately 200,000 people die
in the United States every year from hospital infections and preventable medical
errors. To make matters worse, the situation has not changed from 10 years ago,
when the recommendations of a similar report by the federal government went
ignored.
Car accidents, often classified as the leading preventable cause of death in the
United States, kill fewer than 50,000 people per year.
"Ten years ago, the highly-publicized federal report, 'To Err Is Human,'
highlighted the alarming death toll from preventable medical injuries and called
on the medical community to cut it in half in five years," the new report says.
"Its authors and patient safety advocates believed that its release would spur a
revolution in patient safety. But … the federal government and most states have
made little or no progress in improving patient safety through accountability
mechanisms or other measures."
According to "Dead By Mistake," only 20 states require that medical errors be
reported, and even among these, standards vary widely and enforcement is
inconsistent. Five states are implementing mandatory reporting systems, five
have voluntary systems, and 20 have no error reporting systems at all.
The Hearst report accuses lobbyists of working to ensure that the 1999 report's
recommendation of a nationwide mandatory error reporting system was never
implemented.
Common medical errors include prescription errors and surgeries or other
procedures conducted on the wrong organ or the wrong side of the body. Common
causes of medical errors include sleep deprivation by care providers, poor
patient-doctor communication, insufficient nurses, poor documentation and
illegible handwriting.
The report recommends that patients look after their own safety by becoming
better informed about procedures and medications they are being given, which
includes actively asking questions of health care providers. Specific measures,
such as having a doctor mark the site of an operation in permanent marker, can
also decrease the risk of certain errors.
Back
to top
