Medical errors may claim 250,000 lives every year, making them the third-leading cause of death in the United States, according to a study published on Tuesday.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine found that more Americans die every year from medical errors such as wrong diagnoses, surgical errors, and mistakes in medication than any other medical condition other than heart disease and cancer. This would also be more than respiratory disease, accidents, stroke, and Alzheimer’s.
The study, published in the BMJ, was the result of a careful analysis of death records spanning eight years, and found far higher numbers than a previous report published by the Institute of Medicine in 1999, which reported as many as 98,000 people died every year from medical error. Now, study author Dr. Martin Makary, who is also the surgical director of the Johns Hopkins Multidisciplinary Pancreas Clinic and a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, shockingly found that between 200,000 and 400,000 people in the U.S. die each year from preventable medical errors.
This averages out to roughly 700 deaths a day, or about 9.5 percent of all deaths annually in the United States, according to CBS News.
“For the study, Makary and his colleagues evaluated four separate studies that analyzed medical death rate data from 2000 to 2008, including one by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Based on 2013 data on hospitalization rates, they found that of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error. They said that adds up to 9.5 percent of all deaths a year in the U.S. According to CDC data, heart disease is the current leading cause of death in the U.S., killing more than 611,000 people per year. Cancer comes in second with more than 584,000 deaths.”
If proven true, this research would place medical errors ahead of respiratory illness, which kills 150,000 people each year and which the CDC currently considers the third-leading cause of death in the United States. Dr. Makary, along with co-author Michael Daniel, also from Johns Hopkins, says that medical errors are not a separate coding classification on death certificates or included in the annual statistics of common causes of death in the U.S. released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This makes it difficult to recognize incident rates for most people, and makes it less likely policy makers will actually do something about it.
These “medical errors” can have a wide range of causes, from incompetent physicians, drug mishaps, and unnecessary surgery to not calling specialists when needed, missing life-threatening symptoms, and communication breakdowns when transferring patients. Such problems reflect system-wide problems more than they do bad doctors, such as poorly coordinated care procedures and inconsistent insurance coverage,
“It boils down to people dying from the care that they receive rather than the disease for which they are seeing care,” Dr. Makary said, according to the Alaska Dispatch News.
The study authors recommend a change in how data on cause of death is collected, noting that cancer and heart disease are tallied as separate causes of death and thus receive more media attention and funding than medical care gone awry.
“We spend a lot of money on cancer and heart disease but we have not even recognized that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States,” Makary told NBC News. “We have not as a country recognized the endemic problem of people dying from the care that they receive rather than the illness or injury for which they seek care.”
In an open letter, they advocate for the CDC to add medical errors to the top causes of death, as the study authors believe dealing with the problem of preventable complications in medical care more openly will be the first step to solving it, in addition to educating doctors on the importance of reporting medical errors.
[Photo by Lefteris Pitarakis – WPA Pool/Getty Images]
250,000 People A Year Die From Medical Errors: Now Third-Leading Cause Of Death In U.S., Study Suggests is an article from: The Inquisitr News
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