Study: Almost One in Five Patients are Harmed by Hospital Care
Not all the problems were serious. Most were temporary and treatable, like a bout with severe low blood sugar from receiving too much insulin or a urinary infection caused by a catheter. But 42.7 percent of them required extra time in the hospital for treatment of problems like an infected surgical incision.
In 2.9 percent of the cases, patients suffered a permanent injury — brain damage from a stroke that could have been prevented after an operation, for example. A little more than 8 percent of the problems were life-threatening, like severe bleeding during surgery. And 2.4 percent of them caused or contributed to a patient’s death — like bleeding and organ failure after surgery.
Full article on harmful medical errors in hospitals.
More people are harmed by hospitals than by guns.
Hey, they’re dangerous places to be.
Brian, there is an obvious solution to this problem: empty the hospitals of their patients and then arm them.
The newsworthy finding in the study is not that one in five patients are injured. It is that there has been no improvement over the past decade.
It’s even worse — one-quarter of hospital admissions result in a medical error. The reason that only 18% of patients experience an error is that some people experience two errors.
If there is no price competition there will be no quality competition. Isn’t that one of the persistent messages at this blog?
There have been a lot of “errors harming patients studies” and many of them have had questionable methodologies.
While errors are undoubtedly a problem, my own little red flags are raised when the New York Times article comes out before the article is published, and the study is presented as an indictment of the U.S. health care system without discussing error rates in other, comperable, systems.
I believe their have been studies of errors in other systems, and other systems seem to have error rates as high or higher than ours.
I personally try to avoid doctors when at all possible. I go for check-up’s, but I’ve never had a cold, flu, virus, or any other illness where going to the doctor has actually made me feel better.