Four hundred thousand patients in the hospitals in the United States die every year because of medical errors—from mistakes that could have been prevented. The BMJ article, published three days ago, says that “if the medical error was a disease, it would rank as the third leading cause of death in the US.” Preventable medical errors kill more people than accidents, suicides, breast cancer, stroke, and AIDS do.
Right now, heart diseases and cancers are ahead of hospital-acquired-deaths, but if the trend continues, medical errors could outgun the top two killers.
Human errors are inevitable. Most medical errors are unintended. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics are human, and like others, they will also make mistakes. True. But how long can we hide behind the “to err is human” alibi to justify to the public that half a million patients in American hospitals die because of their doctors? That the hospitals are no longer safe places.
Our health care remains fundamentally unsafe. “It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeking care,” the authors write.
How often do patients die of iatrogenic deaths in our country? Honestly, nobody knows. We do not recognize medical errors, nor do we have systems to capture them. And If detected, we cover them with a thick bandage and seldom report—let alone discuss—them.
Our diagnoses lack accuracy. We tend to choose unproven therapies. We are unable to reduce avoidable infections. We are aware of but never acknowledge drug mix-ups. We treat surgical mishaps with hush-hush. We do not monitor as intensely- and as long- as we should. And we shame and blame an individual when things go wrong. To put it mildly, we have been ill-taught and ill-trained to make our hospitals a safe place to heal.
