23/05/2018
The third-leading cause of death in US most doctors don't want you to know about:
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A recent Johns Hopkins study claims more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical errors. Other reports claim the numbers to be as high as 440,000.
Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
Advocates are fighting back, pushing for greater legislation for patient safety.
PHYSICIANS WHO MAKE ERRORS:
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Despite rare examples of malevolent physicians, there is little evidence that much medical error is due to “bad apples.” Although anesthesiologists pioneered modern research into the safety of patients, no specialty is immune to error. Procedural mishaps are common in surgical specialties, perhaps because they are hard to disguise. Mistakes may be more common when a physician is inexperienced and when new techniques are introduced. Misread radiographs and pathology specimens, laboratory errors, and mistakes made in administering radiation therapy also threaten the safety of patients. Trainees often err. Wu et al surveyed medical house officers in 3 training programs in internal medicine about their most serious mistake. Altogether, 45% reported making at least 1 error, 31% of which resulted in a patient's death. Lesar et al found that more prescribing errors occurred among first-year postgraduate residents than among other physicians. Wilson et al found that more errors occurred in a pediatric intensive care unit when new physicians joined the rotation.
The US Institute of Medicine's landmark 1999 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System :
The thrust of most stories is still about bad people doing bad things—finger-pointing but too little attention on the underlying system that fails. There’s still a lot of stories where there’s a big focus on finger-pointing and how you are going to hold people accountable.
