Medical errors occur much more often in U.S. hospitals than previously estimated. According to a study recently published in the journal Health Affairs, numerous hospital errors go undetected. In fact, at least 90 percent of hospital errors resulting in patient injury, infection, and other issues are not recorded.
The research indicates that about one in three Americans will suffer from a medical error during a hospital stay, and range from bedsores, to foreign objects left in the body from surgical procedures, to deadly staph infections. Findings indicate that about ten times as many hospital errors occur than previously estimated.
A 1999 report by the U.S. Institute of Medicine estimating that as many as 98,000 deaths and over 1 million injuries occur due to medical errors each year sparked strong efforts to track patient safety. Although progress has being made, the standard of quality is still sorely lacking. Susan Dentzer, editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, pointed out, “Without doubt, we’ve seen improvements in health care over the past decade, and even pockets of excellence, but overall progress has been agonizingly slow.” She went on to explain, “It’s clear that we still have a great deal of work to do in order to achieve a health care system that is consistently high-quality—that is, safe, effective, patient-centered, efficient, timely, and devoid of disparities based on race or ethnicity.”
David Classen, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, and colleagues, studied 795 patient records among three U.S. teaching hospitals and found that adverse events occurred among one-third of those admitted to hospitals. Findings showed that voluntary reporting by hospitals, in addition to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s method for tracking adverse events, were not sufficient in providing accurate information.
The authors wrote, “Hospitals that use such methods alone to measure their overall performance on patient safety may be seriously misjudging actual performance.” They further noted, “Reliance on such methods could produce misleading conclusions about safety in the U.S. health-care system and could misdirect patient-safety improvement efforts.
n the research team’s comparison of measuring systems for medical error detection, while voluntary reporting programs recorded only four medical errors, the use of system designed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for measuring hospital errors identified 35. However, use of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s new measuring tool detected 354 events that occurred among patients in the three facilities.
The researchers noted, “Our findings indicate that two methods commonly used by most care delivery organizations and supported by policy makers to measure the safety of care fail to detect more than 90 percent of the adverse events that occur among hospitalized patients.”
According to the research team, administrative data collected by hospitals is used in the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality method of detecting medical errors and this is the standard method used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in evaluating hospital safety. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement method detects incidences of “unintended physical injury resulting from, or contributed to, by medical care.” The new tool is now used by many American hospitals.
~ from reuters
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