Preventable medical mistakes take an intolerable toll

USA Today
Editorial
November 19, 2010

If a 747 jetliner crashed every day, killing all 500 people aboard, there would be a national uproar over aviation safety and an all-out mobilization to fix the problem. In the nation's hospitals, though, about the same number of people die on average every day from medical "adverse events," many of them preventable errors such as infections or incorrect medications. Where's the outrage?

Obviously, patients who die one-by-one don't attract attention the way a fiery air crash does, and the problem isn't new. A 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 98,000 people a year died in hospitals from medical errors. Now, 11 years later, a new survey from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services finds that about 1 in every 7 Medicare patients in hospitals suffers a serious medical mishap.

The report says these adverse events contribute to the deaths of an estimated 180,000 patients a year. Of those, roughly 80,000 are caused by errors that could be caught and prevented, such as letting infections develop, giving the patient the wrong medication or administering an excess dose of the right drug. Aside from the human toll, the extra medical care required to correct for these mistakes costs taxpayers more than $4 billion a year.

More