10 | 14 | 2006 Posted By William G. Pintas

Medical Errors Can Be Eliminated

"When defects are common, they can feel normal—inevitable. Instead of trying to fix them, people accept them. For a lot that is wrong with health care today, that is exactly the situation—even though the Institute of Medicine reports that as many as 100,000 people die each year in hospitals from avoidable errors. These errors aren't invisible. Many nurses, doctors, patients and families are all too familiar with what went wrong in care despite the best efforts of the clinicians. But if completely preventing errors seems a hopeless task, why even try?

Recent experience—at first from just a handful of hospitals, but now from hundreds—shows that this pessimism is unfounded. Many kinds of errors can be completely eliminated; "zero defects" is possible. Some hospitals are, for example, achieving once impossible success at eliminating certain kinds of infections and medication errors. There is no reason these successes can't be widely replicated, maybe everywhere.

In 2000, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in cooperation with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), challenged hospitals to apply for grants to help them "pursue perfection" in their safety, reliability, patient focus, waiting times and efficiency. More than 200 hospitals applied; seven were chosen as grantees in what became the Pursuing Perfection Project. After five years, each was still far from "perfect," but their achievements clearly raised the bar for all U.S. hospitals."

Read the full story at MSNBC.com