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It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient's death, the numbers come out worse.
[...] In 2010, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Human Services said that bad hospital care contributed to the deaths of 180,000 patients in Medicare alone in a given year.
Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.
That would make medical errors the third-leading cause of death in America, behind heart disease, which is the first, and cancer, which is second.
The new estimates were developed by John T. James, a toxicologist at NASA's space center in Houston who runs an advocacy organization called Patient Safety America. James has also written a book about the death of his 19-year-old son after what James maintains was negligent hospital care.
Asked about the higher estimates, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association said the group has more confidence in the IOM's estimate of 98,000 deaths. ProPublica asked three prominent patient safety researchers to review James' study, however, and all said his methods and findings were credible.
[...] 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."
The story describes additional studies that were performed and then solicited feedback from other doctors who supported the view that the 98,000 figure underreports the problem and that the situation warrants further investigation, reporting, and action.
Have any Soylentils personally experienced or observed medical mistakes that had an adverse outcome? Alternatively, has anyone experienced a medical triumph in the face of very poor odds for a positive outcome? What about medical treatments in countries besides the US?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday September 26 2016, @01:10AM
Sorry, but your sarcasm is unwarranted. My wife was admitted to a hospital, but because of a bed shortage she was placed in the neurology ward rather than the cardiac ward. She nearly died because of this. The doctors were doing everything they knew how, but they weren't cardiac specialists, and had written her off as a goner. I basically threw a fit to get her to move them to the cardiac ward, where even the nurses knew how to treat her kind of condition, and she improved immediately.
There's so much specialization that frequently doctors don't know what's going on outside their specialty. I didn't know how she should be treated, but I knew certain features that the treatment should contain (like a telemetry reading of her heart rhythms). This is because I've been with her in such places before.
Well, she had fallen and hit her head, so the neurology ward wasn't totally unreasonable. But it was unreasonable for HER. The reason she had fallen was her heart problem. I think that's finally been resolved after several operations...and the initial problem was scarring caused by open heart surgery to repair a ventral cardiac defect. She's still got a few heart problems that they consider too dangerous to address...a leaky valve, e.g. I've got no idea how to address those problems, but this doesn't keep me from knowing certain basic features about the kind of treatment she needs.
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