Personal Injury Law

Medical Errors Cause Hundreds of Preventable Deaths

By Beth Janicek

According tot the Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of U.S Medicare patients from 2004 to 2006.  Additionally, the medical errors cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion.

Healthgrades evaluated 41 million Medicare patient records and found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.

Further findings included:

"Patients who experienced a patient safety incident had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of the incident. The overall death rate among patients who experienced one or more patient safety incidents fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting. The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure."

The report supports other studies which have found that hospitals have an alarming rate of medical errors which result in hundreds of deaths.  Further investigation is needed to discover why incidents have increased in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting so that improvements can be made and lives can be saved.  One of the benefits of medical malpractice litigation is to investigate why medical errors occur so as to prevent the error from being made in the future.

Full post as published by San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).