MEDICAL MISTAKES
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During 1999 mainstream institutions revealed that
one of the biggest killers in the U.S. is medical mistakes.- ** The NEW YORK TIMES reported that 5% of people admitted to hospitals, or about 1.8 million people per year, in the U.S. pick up an infection while there.[1] Such infections are called "iatrogenic" -- meaning "induced by a physician," or, more loosely, "caused by medical care." Iatrogenic infections are directly responsible for 20,000 deaths among hospital patients in the U.S. each year, and they contribute to an additional 70,000 deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The yearly dollar cost of iatrogenic infections is $4.5 billion, according to the CDC.
- The rate of iatrogenic infections has increased 36% in the past 20 years[1] partly because people entering hospitals now are sicker and more vulnerable then they were 20 years ago, and partly because excessive use of antibiotics has created antibiotic-resistant killer microbes.
- ** A large part of the problem is health care workers who fail to wash their hands properly, the TIMES reported. "Hands are the most dangerous thing in the hospital," says Dr. Robert A. Weinstein, director of infectious diseases for the Cook County Bureau of Health Services in Chicago. A study conducted at the Duke University Medical Center found that only 17% of physicians treating patients in an intensive care unit washed their hands appropriately.[1]
- An alternative to hand-washing would be use of latex gloves. Unfortunately, many health care workers view gloves as protecting themselves exclusively -- they put them on in the morning and wear them all day long, the equivalent of not washing their hands. A study of glove use at a long-term care center found that gloves were worn 82% of the time when their use was indicated, but changed appropriately only 16% of the time.
- Hospitals have few incentives to monitor infection rates among their patients. "If you don't do good [infection] surveillance, you don't detect infections, which means they don't exist and you look great," says Dr. William Jarvis, chief of the Investigation and Prevention branch of the Hospital Infections Program at the CDC in Atlanta.[1]
- Various remedies are being considered. One is to urge health care workers to wash their hands with waterless, alcohol-based antimicrobial hand rubs which are as effective as traditional hand-washing but faster to use and gentler than soap and water.
- Another approach is to train patients to ask each health care worker who comes into their room, "Did you wash your hands?"
- The "big picture" of medical mistakes is even worse. A report entitled, TO ERR IS HUMAN, issued by the National Institute of Medicine (a division of the National Academy of Sciences) in November found that medical mistakes kill somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 people (average: 71,000) in hospitals in the U.S. each year.[2]
- There are about 33.6 million people admitted to hospitals each year in the U.S. Somewhere between 2.9% and 3.7% (average: 3.3%) of these suffer an "adverse event" while in the hospital.[2,pg.1] An "adverse event" is defined as an injury caused by medical management rather than by the underlying disease or condition of the patient.[2,pg.25] Of these adverse events, somewhere between 8.8% and 13.6% (average: 11.2%) are fatal.[2,pg.1] Of all adverse events, somewhere between 53% and 58% (average: 55.5%) are attributable to mistakes.[2,pg.22] Therefore we can calculate[3] that, on average, one out of every 500 people admitted to a hospital in the U.S. is killed by mistake.
(For comparison, the chance of being killed in a commercial airline accident is one per 8 million flights.) Thus medical mistakes qualify as a major public health problem. Even the low estimate, 44,000 killed by medical mistakes each year, exceeds the number of people killed in the U.S. by automobile accidents (43,458 in 1998). - For those who are accustomed to thinking in terms of 1-in-a-million as an "acceptable" death rate for technological errors, the 1-in-500 deaths by medical mistakes equates to 2000-in-a-million.
- TO ERR IS HUMAN acknowledges that the 1-in-500 figure may underestimate the size of the death-by-medical-mistake problem because the 1-in-500 estimate is based on information found in patient records and many medical mistakes may not be acknowledged in patient records. TO ERR IS HUMAN says, "Most errors and safety issues go undetected and unreported, both externally and within health care organizations."
[1] Emily Yoffe, "Doctors Are Reminded, 'Wash Up!'," NEW YORK TIMES November 9, 1999, pg. F-1.
[2] Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S. Donaldson, editors, TO ERR IS HUMAN; BUILDING A SAFER HEALTH SYSTEM (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999). ISBN 0-309-06837-1.
[3] Using data from TO ERR IS HUMAN (pgs. 1 and 22), the average probability of death by medical mistake after being admitted to a hospital is: the probability of an "adverse event" caused by medical management (0.033) multiplied by the probability that the adverse event will be fatal (0.112) multiplied by the probability that the adverse event was caused by human error (0.555); so 0.033 * 0.112 * 0.555 = 0.002 = 1/500. The low death estimate for hospital deaths is 33.6E6 * 0.029 * 0.088 * 0.53 = 43,700; the high death estimate is 33.6E6 * 0.037 * 0.136 * 0.58 = 98,000.
[4] We had to make some assumptions to derive the 4% figure. TO ERR IS HUMAN, pg. 33, says 2.4 million prescriptions were improperly filled in Massachusetts in a recent year. We do not know how many total prescriptions are filled in a year in Massachusetts, but we can estimate the number this way: TO ERR IS HUMAN, pg. 27, says 2.5 billion prescriptions were filled in the U.S. in 1998. In 1998, the U.S. population was about 270 million people, so each person had 9.2 prescriptions filled (average) in 1998. In 1997, the Massachusetts population was about 2.32% of the U.S. population, so in 1998 when the U.S. population was 270 million, the Massachusetts population was probably about 6.3 million people; if each person had 9.2 prescriptions filled in 1998 then the total filled in Massachusetts was about 58 million. Therefore 2.4
  This week's top stories from the web's No.1 science and technology news service 8 June 2006
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