North CarolinaThe first large study in a decade finds efforts to make hospitals safer for patients are falling short, reported The New York Times yesterday. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs—medical mistakes —and hospital-acquired infections.
The New England Journal of Medicine study reviewed the records of 2,341 patients admitted to 10 North Carolina hospitals and found about 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care. Of those patients, 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable and 2.4 percent of the problems caused or contributed to a patient's death. Medication errors caused problems in 162 cases.
The last study of this magnitude (The Institute of Medicine, 1999) found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than one million injuries a year in the US. A government report (Dept. of Health and Services, Nov. 2010) said that in October 2008, 13.5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries, or 134,000 patients, experienced "adverse events" during hospital stays.
This latest study said that many of the problems were caused by the hospitals' failure to use measures that had been proved to avert mistakes and to prevent infections from devices like urinary catheters, ventilators and lines inserted into veins and arteries.