Medical Errors: Do 400,000 people really die from these every year in America? What does it look like from the inside of a hospital?
I just read an article in the Journal of Patient Safety by a NASA toxicologist and patient safety advocate, John T. James PhD, which addressed the question of medical errors in hospital settings. Dr. James evaluated the results of 4 studies of patient adverse events (PAE's) and extrapolated the results to estimate that 400,000 deaths yearly are associated with preventable patient harms. The Harvard Medical Practice study which reviewed records from several New York hospitals in 1984 estimated that deaths due to medical error numbered about 98,000 per year, and that number has been quoted widely and embraced as the truth by the Institute of Medicine, a nonprofit organization which seeks to advise patients and decision makers about important issues in medicine. This current article uses different methods and suggests that the number may be much higher. After reading the article about the article on a public interest site on the internet, I perused the comments, which were primar...