By Dr. David Eifrig
Sometimes, doctors can be killers. I’m not talking about homicide. I mean that the folks we trust with our lives make lethal mistakes... And it happens more often than you might expect.
British researchers recently released a report with a staggering finding: One in 20 patients are victims of preventable harm in medical care. And of those folks, about 12% suffer permanent disability or death. The Brits aren’t the only ones with this problem, either. Here in the U.S., we face a similar issue. In 2015, we wrote about a study that shocked us. Published in the Journal of Patient Safety , the paper claimed that as many as 440,000 Americans die annually from hospital errors, injuries, accidents, and infections... That’s roughly one-sixth of all deaths that occur in the U.S. each year.
But here’s the thing... That study took some liberties with how it got those numbers. It used insurance billing codes to calculate the number of patients with adverse events, which doesn’t account for whether the adverse event directly caused the patient’s death. Earlier this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association released a study spanning over two decades – it showed that about 2.8% of all U.S. deaths were due to adverse effects of medical treatment. That’s about 78,000 folks each year, not 440,000. That’s not as scary, but it’s still too high. To help put that in perspective... In 2018,
THE GOOD NEWS... IT GETS SAFER STARTING THIS MONTH
American Consequences
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