Presentazione

da "www.healthnews.com"

Published: Tuesday, 11 August 2009
 
An estimated 200,000 Americans will lose their lives in 2009 alone due to preventable medical errors and hospital infections. This startling information comes from a new investigative report released by the Hearst Corporation called “Dead By Mistake.”

The report revealed that only 20 states currently have a mandatory medical error reporting system in place, while an equal number have no system at all. Of the remaining 10 states, 5 offer voluntary reporting and 5 more are in the process of developing reporting systems. The Hearst Corporation analysis also found that for states having mandatory reporting systems, only a small percentage of hospital mistakes are actually reported due to varying standards and lack of enforcement.

The “Dead By Mistake” report comes a full decade after the release of a report by the US National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine entitled “To Err Is Human” that outlined numerous ways of implementing reforms in the healthcare community to improve patient safety. According the Institute of Medicine’s website, the report “lays out a comprehensive strategy by which government, health care providers, industry, and consumers can reduce preventable medical errors.” In addition, the website points out, “Concluding that the know-how already exists to prevent many of these mistakes, the report sets as a minimum goal of 50 percent reduction in errors over the next five years.” However, these proposed reforms have all but been ignored by facilities and government agencies.

The 2009 report from Hearst points out that the 1999 report encouraged states to require medical error reporting, although 10 years later we are less than halfway there. In addition, the “To Err Is Human” report stated that the public “has the right to be informed about unsafe conditions,” yet 45 states and the District of Columbia fail to provide hospital-specific information.

The 1999 report also made the recommendation for the creation of a national patient safety center that today remains under-funded and falling short of expectations. In addition, only a handful of hospitals heard and responded to the urging of the report to pursue comprehensively safer patient care. In fact, the “Dead By Mistake” report shows that medical errors are more numerous than they were a decade ago. Since 1999, it is estimated that nearly 2 million people have died of preventable medical errors and hospital-acquired infections.

Common factors believed to be contributing to deadly medical mistakes are illegible handwriting on both prescriptions and orders, sleep deprivation among health-care providers, lack of communication between doctors and their patients, poor nurse-to-patient ratios, poor documentation that includes incomplete or unavailable medical records, lack of dosing instructions for patients, and lack of monitoring of medication use.

The 2009 report by Hearst points out that President Bill Clinton made an attempt to create a mandatory reporting system for serious medical errors in 1999 and 2000, but met major opposition from both the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association. These organizations actually spent $81 million lobbying against the creation of such a reporting system claiming that it would serve only to cause more secrecy and further promote the lack of reporting of medical mistakes.

Hearst’s research suggests that it is a lack of transparency and the prevalence of secrecy surrounding medical errors that creates difficulties in accurately tracking the actual number mistake-related deaths. However, the report clearly states, “If medical errors and infections were better tracked, they would easily top the list. In fact, a visit to your doctor or a hospital is twice as likely to result in your death [than] a drive on America’s highways.”