|
|
Browse
our Frontpage |
|
| Medical errors still kill 100,000 a year in US |
Washington / AFP
05/20/2005
Medical errors still kill around 100,000 people annually in the United
States, according to a study Wednesday published in the Journal of
the Medical Association.
While certain hospitals have made significant improvement after a
2000 study identified up to 98,000 deaths a year were caused by medical
practitioners' negligence, the death rate remains too high generally,
researchers found.
"All hospitals have implemented
some new practices to improve safety," the report said, noting
as an example fewer cases of accidental injection with concentrated
potassium chloride after the substance was removed from nursing unit
shelves.
The study's authors found that computerizing prescriptions meant errors
were down 81 percent in some centers. Putting a pharmacist in with
medical teams had also seen allergic reactions from certain medications
drop by 78 percent.
But while some centers have managed to reduce deaths and illness from
safety lapses by as much as 93 percent, the efforts only affect safety
"at the margin, their overall impact is hard to see in national
statistics."
Hospital infections alone "most of which are preventable, account
for more than 90,000 deaths per year, and hospital acquired bloodstream
infections alone may rank as the eight leading cause of death in the
United States," it said.
"The groundwork for improving
safety has been laid these past five years but progress is frustratingly
slow," the report by co-authors in the study Lucian Leape of
Harvard School of Public Health and Donald Berwick of the Harvard
Medical School found.
"Building a culture of safety
is proving to be an immense task and the barriers are formidable.
Whether significant progress will be achieved in the next five years
depends on how successfully those barriers are addressed." |
| |
 |
 |
|
|
