If someone were to walk up to you on the street and ask “how many people die every year as a result of medical errors in the United States?,” what would be your answer? Would you guess somewhere in the thousands? Maybe in the tens of thousands? As it turns out, those guesses would be well below the figure that a report back in April uncovered. According to that report, 325,000 people die every year as the result of medical errors.
This bit of news is not meant to scare you into resisting medical treatment — far from it. Instead, it is merely meant as a way of getting you to realize the scope of the medical error problem. Medical mistakes are inherent to the medical system. No matter how much training a doctor or surgeon receives, he or she will always be susceptible to making a mistake.
When these mistakes occur, lives are changed. A person could spend weeks or even months in a hospital trying to recover from a surgeon’s shaky hand, or a doctor’s misdiagnosis — and that’s if their lucky, as the statistic above demonstrates. But regardless of the affected patient’s fate, they or their loved ones could hold the people or institution responsible for such negligence in civil court.
Hospitals are trying to reduce the number of medical errors that occur every year. In response to the report from earlier this year, medical institutions have started adopting new practices to try to keep patients safe and healthy.
Source: FierceHealthcare, “Updated medical errors report shows progress,” Zack Burdyk, July 11, 2014
