Personal Injury Law

Medical Mistake Rates Persist Despite Effort

By Steven M. Levin and John J. Perconti

High-profile studies have recently emphasized the scope of the problem of medical mistakes across the country. As blog readers are well aware, almost 100,000 patients are killed each year because of preventable medical errors. Many other victims experience various degrees of problems because of the negligent actions of their medical providers.

With all of the attention paid to these examples of medical malpractice, many advocates sought to institute changes that would improve medical care and lower the instances of error. Unfortunately, new research our of the Harvard & Stanford Medical Schools and summarized late last year in Science Daily found that those efforts are thus far having little effect.

The five year study examined instances of medical mistakes at hospitals from 2002 to 2007. The research focused on hospitals that had shown a particularly strong commitment to improving patient safety, making the lack of positive changes even more disturbing. It is likely that the results are no different when looking specifically at Illinois medical mistakes.

One of the study?s authors explained the take-away lesson from the research, ?Our findings are a call to action for the health-care system. We need a nationwide strategy for reducing harm from medical care.?

Full post as published by Illinois Medical Malpractice Blog on February 17, 2011 (boomark / email).