Hospital Safety Still an Issue: Better Medical Care, Not Tort Reform, is the Answer

December 25, 2010

Whether for a check-up, injury or major surgery, we expect to leave the hospital in better shape than when we arrived. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, is the latest in a series of reports which clearly demonstrates that efforts to improve the safety of our hospitals are failing, resulting in countless injuries and numerous deaths each year. The problem is not unnecessary and groundless medical malpractice lawsuits, but instead poor medical care that is continuing to needlessly harm a significant number of patients each year.

The most recent study examined 10 North Carolina hospitals from 2002 to 2007. Records of over 2,300 patients were reviewed at the hospitals during this five year period and researchers uncovered 588 incidents of medical mistakes that resulted in harm to patients. The types of adverse events resulting from medical mistakes varied and included injuries such as falls, low blood pressure, excessive bleeding during surgery and, most commonly, hospital-acquired infections.

A significant portion of the errors were severe. Forty three percent of the adverse events uncovered by the researchers required an extended stay in the hospital. In just over eight percent of the cases, the adverse events were life threatening and in 2.4 percent of the cases, the mistakes caused or contributed to the patient's death, according to an analysis of the study in The New York Times.

Also of interest was the fact that the researchers did not find a statistically significant decrease in hospital errors over the life of the five year study and instead noted "little evidence of widespread improvement."

Though the NEJM study focused on one geographic region, the authors of the study were not expecting that other areas of the country were faring any better. In fact, the research notes that North Carolina was selected as the focus of the study because of its "high level of engagement" in efforts to improve patient safety. Suggesting, that if anything, the extent of medical mistakes and patient harm in hospitals in other parts of the country likely will be worse than what the study found.

The New York Times report notes this study is the largest attempt to quantify hospital safety improvement since the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report. That report concluded that hospital errors injured one million people and caused 98,000 deaths annually.

Now is not the time to curtail the rights of injured patients. Instead, we should use our efforts and resources to improve patient care and let improved care and reduced medical mistakes in turn lower the need for medical malpractice litigation. If you have been injured as a result of hospital error, speak with an experienced medical malpractice attorney right away.

Article provided by Schultz & Trombly, PLLC
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