Medical Errors Still Common in U.S. Hospitals

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(NaturalNews) More than 2 percent of all hospital patients are victims of a medical error, according to a study conducted by the health care ratings organization HealthGrades.

Researchers reviewed a Medicare database to evaluate almost 5,000 hospitals across the United States for their performance on 12 different measures of patient safety between the years of 2005 and 2007. They found records of a total of 913,000 "patient safety events," meaning errors that led to medical problems. This came out to 2.3 percent of Medicare admissions at those hospitals. Put another way, it translates to an error once every 1.7 minutes among Medicare patients alone.

Patients who were victims of a medical error had a 10 percent chance of dying, the researchers found.

According to lead researcher and orthopedic surgeon Rick May, the actual prevalence of errors is probably twice as high, since roughly half of medical errors go unreported.

The most common errors were bed sores, postoperative respiratory failure or serious infection, and death from serious but treatable complications among surgical inpatients.

"The good news is that there are hospitals that are doing an amazing job when it comes to patient safety," May said. "Patients need to know that they have a substantially lower risk of experiencing a medical error and therefore a lower risk of death or complications when they are admitted to one of these exceptional top-performing hospitals."

The study found that the risk of medical error was 43 percent lower at award-winning hospitals than at bottom-ranked hospitals.

"This finding of better performance was consistent across all 12 patient safety indicators studied," the researchers wrote.

According to May, the administrators of many hospitals have no idea where their institutions rank, because error rates are never reported to them.

"For decades, their system has been set up not to report medical mistakes," he said, "so you really have to dig."

Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com; www.healthleadersmedia.com.

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