9486 in the collection
Why We Don't Want Teaching to Be Like Doctoring
Book Excerpt:
According to a groundbreaking study by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine in 1999, preventable medical errors kill between forty-four thousand and ninety-eight thousand Americans in hospitals each year. (Lest you think they plucked these numbers out of thin air, they are based on a Harvard study that examined thirty thousand patients at fifty-one randomly selected hospitals in New York, and a similar study of fifteen thousand patients at hospitals in Colorado and Utah). That number makes preventable medical errors the eighth leading cause of death in the United Stats, ahead of automobiles and breast cancer.
According to other studies cited by the Institute, medication errors alone kill seven thousand Americans per year, more than workplace injuries (only six thousand dead). A follow-up studyy of thirty-six hospitals and nursing homes, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that one in five doses of medication was either the wrong drug or the wrong dose, or given at the wrong time or to the wrong patient. Another study conducted at two teaching hospitals found that almost 2 percent of patients were prescribed the wong medicine. And these were good hospitals. Imagine the odds when the the medicine is being prescribed in a bad hospital--or not even a hospital at all, but at a clinic or the office of a general practitioner.
Now, you might expect such a study to provoke considerable outrage, and it did. It did not, however, provoke considerable action. A follow-up report by the Washington Post three years later concluded:
There's a lot of talk, but no significant progress. The reasons, observers say, include fierce resistance by doctors and hospitals to mandatory reporting and other Institute of Medicine recommendations, a lack of oversight by the federal government and the absence of an effective consumer lobby. . . .
— Gregory Baer
Life: The Odds (And How to Improve Them)
2003-10-
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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