Mistakes still common in hospital care, study finds

Dec 13, 2010 by Andrew

Efforts to make hospitals safer for patients are falling short, researchers report in the first large study in a decade to analyze harm, from medical care and to track it over time.

The study, conducted from 2002 to 2007 in 10 North Carolina hospitals, found that harm to patients was common and that the number of incidents didn’t decrease over time. The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs and hospital-acquired infections.

“It is unlikely that other regions of the country have fared better,” said Dr. Christopher Landrigan, lead author of the study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine.

It is one of the most, rigorous efforts to collect data about patient safety since a landmark report in 1999 found that medical mistakes caused as many as 98,000 deaths and more than 1 million injuries a year in the U.S. That Institute of Medicine report led to a national movement to reduce errors.

But instead of improvements, Landrigan’s team found a high rate of problems. About 18 percent of patients were harmed by their medical care, some more than once, and 63.1 percent of the injuries were judged to be preventable. Most of the problems were temporary and treatable, but some were serious, and a few — 2.4 percent — caused or contributed to a patient’s death, the study found.

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