Off topic - Report Finds Most Errors at Hospitals Go Unreported – Jan 2012

Report Finds Most Errors at Hospitals Go Unreported New York Times

" . . estimated that more than 130,000 Medicare beneficiaries experienced one or more adverse events in hospitals in a single month.”

Adverse events include

  • medication errors,
  • severe bedsores,
  • infections that patients acquire in hospitals,
  • delirium resulting from overuse of painkillers and
  • excessive bleeding linked to improper use of blood thinners.

Reasons for not reporting the error included:

  • employees do not recognize “what constitutes patient harm”
  • do not realize that particular events harmed patients
  • employees assumed someone else would report the episode
  • they thought it was so common that it did not need to be reported
  • “suspected that the events were isolated incidents unlikely to recur.”
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