; Your Health
they can never be tracked or
corrected, the Health and
Human Services Department report pointed out.
This latest study built
on an earlier HHS study
of Medicare patients that
found one in seven suffered
serious or long-term injuries, or died, as a result of
hospital care. Researchers
said about 44 percent of the
problems were preventable.
In another key study published last spring in the journal Health Affairs, researchers examined patient charts
at three of America’s leading
hospitals and found that an
astounding one in three admissions included some type
of harm to the patient.
Mistakes run the gamut.
The surgeon nicks a healthy
blood vessel; a nurse mistak-
enly administers a toxic dose
of medicine; the staff fails to
adequately disinfect a room,
and a patient contracts a
dangerous “superbug.”
The number of patients
One study of
Medicare
patients
found that
died or were
harmed by their
hospital care.
The number
of patients
who die each
year from
hospital errors
is equal to
jumbo jets
crashing
each week.
who die each year from
preventable hospital errors
is equal to four full jumbo
jets crashing each week.
If airline tragedies of that
magnitude were occurring
with such frequency, no
one would tolerate the loss.
“At its deepest level, what
we’re now having trouble
with is the enormous com-
plexity of medicine,” says
Atul Gawande, a surgeon,
Harvard associate profes-
sor and author who pro-
motes the use of medical
checklists to save lives. “We
now have 13,600 diagnoses,
6,000 drugs, 4,000 medical
and surgical procedures,”
he says. And yet “we have
not paid attention to the
nuts and bolts of what’s re-
quired to manage complex-
ity.” Experts like Gawande
say one reason medical er-
rors continue at such high
rates is that hospitals have
only recently begun to copy
aviation’s decades-long ef-
fort to create safety proce-
dures that take into account
human fallibility—often us-
ing only simple checklists.
