Medical Errors:
How many serious errors occur?
The 1999 Institute of Medicine Report
concluded that from 44,000
to 98,000
people die annually due to errors in inpatient hospital
treatment. Hundreds of articles
on medical errors
have cited the Institute of Medicine Report.
According to Dr. Lucien
Leape
, lead the author of the Harvard study, the number of deaths from medical errors in hospitals account for
the equivalent to the death toll from three jumbo jet crashes every two days. Public Health Reports,
1999;
114: 302-317
July / August, 1999. One in every 10 patients
admitted to a hospital is the victim of at least one mistake.
National Public Radio (NPR) November
21, 2000
,(Audio)
Only 1.53
percent
of patients who were harmed by medical treatment filed malpractice claims.
N Engl J Med 1989 Aug 17;321(7):480-4
The I.O.M. based its conclusion on two reviews of hospital charts
from New York (1984) and Colorado/Utah (1992).
In 1991, the Harvard School of Public Health studied 1984 data from 51 New York hospitals found that 3.7
%
of hospital admissions had an adverse event due to medical error
and 13.6
%
of
those
errors resulted in death. A similar study of hospitals in Utah
and Colorado
found 2.9
%
of hospital admissions had an adverse event due to medical error
and 6.6
%
of those errors resulted in death. Extrapolating to the number of
hospital admissions in 1997 (33,600,000), the IOM arrived at the highly
cited estimates for the upper and lower bounds for deaths due to
hospital errors.
The complete text of the Insensitive of Medicine study is available online:
To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System
Linda T. Kohn, Janet M. Corrigan, and Molla S. Donaldson, Editors
