All tagged Public Health

Medical Error as a Public Health Problem

Medical error seems ironic, almost an oxymoron. How is it possible – nay, even imaginable – that healthcare providers with a minimum of eleven years of postsecondary education in the health sciences commit mistakes in the course of life-saving ministrations? And yet, it has happened enough that in 1999, the Institute of Medicine released a report showcasing the data on this topic: at that time, 44,000 – 98,000 people per year died from medical error. According to a 2016 British Medical Journal report, more than 250,000 people each year died from medical error. The researchers for this report calculated this figure from the studies reported since 1999 and extrapolated to the total number of U.S. hospital admissions in 2013 (Makary and Daniel, 2016). While these numbers seem small (by comparison, the United States had a population of 323 million in 2016), keep in mind that these are deaths occurring at the hands of highly trained professionals. Suffice it to say that one death from medical error is too many, doubtless 250,000 per year.