We’ve all seen the billboards and know the figures: Smoking kills! Drinking and driving kills! While these statements are true, a different threat has been creeping up through the ranks of causes of death: medical errors. Stories are all over the internet of nurses giving wrong drugs to patients or surgeons lopping off the wrong leg. For the longest time, these were thought to be rare exceptions, caused by tired or inexperienced medical professionals.
But that school of thought is now moot.
In a recent study from the British Medical Journal, it was revealed that medical errors are now the third-leading cause of death in the United States. According to the report, medical errors take almost as many lives annually as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), suicide, firearms and car accidents combined.
Struggling for Statistics
The study author, Dr. Martin Makary, is the surgical director of the Johns Hopkins Multidisciplinary Pancreas Clinic and a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine. He examined and analyzed death rate records over eight years. However, he ran into some problems. Death due to medical error is not often printed on death certificates and isn’t found in billing codes. In fact, it’s not tracked in any sort of standardized way. So, Makary had to get creative.
He and his team looked at four different studies conducted from 2000 to 2008. They analyzed the medical death rate in these studies, then looked at 2013 figures. From these statistics, they examined about 35,500,000 hospitalizations. From there, they found that more than 250,000 deaths resulted from medical errors — about one death every two minutes. That’s 9.5 percent of all annual deaths in the U.S., coming in behind heart disease and cancer.
When it comes down to it, most hospitals are understaffed. Different states have different laws dictating the nurse-to-patio ratio required at hospitals, but oftentimes, these mandates go unheeded due to budgetary restraints. And when hospitals are understaffed, patients are at risk.The more patients a nurse is looking after, the more likely they are to suffer — or even die. If hospitals want to see their medical error-related mortality rates drop, having enough doctors and nurses on the floor at all times is key.
However, some errors can be prevented by patients. Even when doctor-/nurse-to-patient ratios are sound, medical professionals have a lot to deal with. So if you are being given medication, ask about it. Ask why you need it, and how much you should take. At the very least, it will cause the nurse to double-check the chart, which could fix errors before they happen.
If you or a loved one does get hurt due to medical error, it’s important to hold the hospital accountable. Otherwise, they could make the same mistakes over and over with little repercussion. Forcing the hospital to pay for their errors may lead to them re-evaluating their procedures so future patients don’t suffer the same injuries you did.