(Newswire.net — September 26, 2013) Portland, OR— Over a dozen years ago a report by Institute of Medicine called “To Err Is Human” provided evidence that nearly 98,000 people a year die due to mistakes in hospitals. After immediately having the number disputed, it now appears that it is now generally accepted fact.
Again in 2010, it was reported by the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human services, the death toll was then approaching 180,000 because of negligence.
Most recently the Journal of Patient Safety now states that the numbers may be between 210,000 and 440,000 patients who go to the hospital expecting to be helped and leave in body bags.
Now that makes the third-leading cause of death in the US is due to medical negligence, behind heart disease and cancer.
When asked about these higher numbers, the American Hospital Association stated the the number as initially reported by the IOM was probably the most accurate.
However nobody knows for sure what the right number is. The actual number of patients who experience harm has never been quantified. So all we can do is make estimates because as expected, providers don’t really want to report mistakes.
It is still better to measure the problem with estimates because it does raise public awareness.
John T. James, based these the estimates on the findings of four recent studies that identified preventable harm suffered by patients – known as “adverse events” in the medical vernacular – using use a screening method called the Global Trigger Tool, which guides reviewers through medical records, searching for signs of infection, injury or error.
By combining the findings and extrapolating across 34 million hospitalizations in 2007, James concluded that preventable errors contribute to the deaths of 210,000 hospital patients a year.
That is the baseline. The actual number more than doubles, James reasoned, because the trigger tool doesn’t catch errors in which treatment should have been provided but wasn’t, because it’s known that medical records are missing some evidence of harm, and because diagnostic errors aren’t captured.
An estimate of 440,000 deaths from care in hospitals “is roughly one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the United States each year,” James wrote in his study. He also cited other research that’s shown hospital reporting systems and peer-review capture only a fraction of patient harm or negligent care.
“Perhaps it is time for a national patient bill of rights for hospitalized patients,” James wrote.
Dr. David Mayer, the vice president of quality and safety at Maryland-based MedStar Health, said people can make arguments about how many patient deaths are hastened by poor hospital care, but that’s not really the point. All the estimates, even on the low end, expose a crisis, he said.
“Way too many people are being harmed by unintentional medical error,” Mayer said, “and it needs to be corrected.”
Source: http://www.propublica.org/article/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-us-hospitals