Every year, over 250,000 are killed due to preventable medical mistakes and errors. It is so huge that this has become the third leading cause of death in the United States. Only heart disease and cancer kill more Americans every year that medical blunders.
A recent analysis and study was done at Johns Hopkins University School of medicine. Professor of Surgery and lead author of the report, Dr. Martin Makary, stated that, “People just don’t die from heart attacks and bacteria. They die from system wide failings and poorly coordinated care. It’s medical care gone awry.”
These medical blunders account for a full ten percent of the deaths in the United States every year. The study suggests that it has become quite dangerous to enter an emergency room or hospital. Also, according to the study, there really is no set way that certain procedures can be put into place to overcome these mistakes and errors.
Other estimates from the Institute of Medicine claims that there are between 44,000-100,000 deaths caused each year by mistakes and malpractice. The medical journal, Health Affairs, published a study in 2011 that stated as much as slightly over one percent of all patients who enter a hospital are killed by malpractice. They estimate that around 35 million Americans a year enter the hospital. That would bring the death rate to over 400,000 people every year.
The research team at Johns Hopkins believes that their estimate of 250,000 deaths a year is likely quite low but that is what their research and data indicated to them at this time. They consider the estimates to be low because they are only working with hospital data. If other medical sites such as nursing homes were taken into consideration, the death rate from medical blunders and incompetence could be astronomical.
The challenge is that medical errors are not really taken notice of and recorded at hospitals. If someone was to call the CEO of a hospital and ask how many deaths have happened due to errors and malpractice, they simply, the study suggests, wouldn’t have any idea.
Dr. Makray concluded that, “Throughout the world, medical error leading to patient death is an unrecognized epidemic.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Reuters