Linda Carroll – More than 1 in 10 patients are harmed in the course of their medical care, and half of those injuries are preventable.
Among the preventable errors, 12 percent led to a patient’s permanent disability or death, according to the report published Wednesday in The BMJ, a medical journal.
The study, which included information on more than 300,000 patients from 70 earlier reports, highlights how serious the problem is, said the study’s lead author, Maria Panagioti, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester.
“We need strategies in place to detect and correct the key causes of patient harm in health care,” Panagioti said in an email. “Our study finds that most harm relates to medication, and this is one core area that preventative strategies could focus on.”
While the study was international in scope, the findings would be applicable to the U.S., Panagioti said. 3,000 Patients Exposed to STDs At Lax Surgery Center
The new findings come two decades after a jarring report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that medical errors resulted in the deaths of as many as 98,000 Americans each year.
“It’s a reminder that 20 years into our realization about the problems with patient safety, the rate of preventable harm caused by health care continues to be unacceptably high, causing a huge burden of unnecessary patient suffering and even death,” said Dr. Albert Wu, an internist and professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the new research.
“This is one of the largest studies ever conducted on the frequency and severity of patient harm,” Wu said. “And it provides evidence that these harms occur in all medical care settings. It’s a problem that needs our attention.”
For the new study, Panagioti and her colleagues combed through the medical literature looking for studies that examined medical errors and patient harms … Read more. (must turn off Ad Blockers to read rest of report on NBC NEWS)
SF Source Headline Health Jul 2019