Kavanagh KT, Saman DM, Bartel R, Westerman K, et al.
Journal of patient safety. Date of publication 2017 Mar 1;volume 13(1):1-5.
1. J Patient Saf. 2017 Mar;13(1):1-5. doi: 10.1097/PTS.0000000000000364.
Estimating Hospital-Related Deaths Due to Medical Error: A Perspective From
Patient Advocates.
Kavanagh KT(1), Saman DM, Bartel R, Westerman K.
Author information:
(1)From the *Health Watch USA, Somerset, Kentucky; †Health Watch USA, Essentia
Institute of Rural Health, Duluth, Minnesota; ‡Patient Advocate, Chilton,
Wisconsin; and §Family Advisor, NICU, Alta Bates Medical Center, Berkeley,
California.
The authors present a viewpoint regarding the quality of data used in estimating
the number of preventable hospital deaths in the United States. Data derived from
countries with a nationalized healthcare system with well-defined and near
uniform implementation of standards may not be applicable to the fragmented
noncentralized delivery system found in the United States. Although U.S. studies
evaluating preventable mortality have based their projections on a small sample
size, it is unlikely that this observation is due to chance, because other
studies evaluating adverse events, a precursor to preventable mortality, have a
much larger sample size and also report an unacceptably high number of events. In
addition, although these estimates involved adult and Medicare-eligible patients
who may have a higher incidence of events and create a bias, but they also did
not capture all events, taken into account of mortality, which occurs after
hospitalization or from misdiagnoses. It is also important not to mitigate
adverse events in patients whose death is imminent. Medicine does not have the
moral authority to place differing values on days, weeks, or years of life. The
contention that there are approximately 200,000 preventable hospital-related
deaths each year in the United States is not unreasonable. Not all hospital
systems in the United States make the same investment in patient safety.
Recently, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality has demonstrated a decline
in adverse events in hospitals, but until uniform implementation of safety
standards takes place, our healthcare system as a whole may well lag behind other
industrialized nations.
DOI: 10.1097/PTS.0000000000000364
PMID: 28187011 [Indexed for MEDLINE]
