Study Finds Patient Safety Is Not Improving in Hospitals
Hospital stays continue to be hazardous to a patient’s health and efforts to reduce medical mistakes are falling short, according to the first large study of patient safety in a decade.
The recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine focused on the practices of 10 North Carolina hospitals from 2002 to 2007. Researchers chose North Carolina because the state is considered a leader in efforts to improve patient safety. But instead of improvements, researchers found a high rate of problems. About 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care, and more than 63 percent of the injuries were preventable. The mistakes ranged from minor to life-threatening and led to 14 deaths.
The most common problems were complications from procedures or drugs and hospital-acquired infections. Patients reported harm such as severe bleeding during an operation, serious breathing trouble caused by a procedure that was performed incorrectly, and a fall that dislocated a patient’s hip.
Efforts to improve patient safety intensified after a 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine found that medical mistakes caused more than a million injuries and as many as 98,000 deaths a year. But these efforts have generally failed. Few medical facilities have moved to electronic records and even simple preventative steps, such as hand washing, are not being enforced.