What is this article actually about?
The new article refers to research done over the last 2 decades, and most recently an article by NASA toxicologist and patient safety advocate John T. James PhD in the Journal of Patient Safety in 2013. Dr. James evaluated 4 previous studies and estimated that 400,000 people, approximately, die yearly in the US of conditions that were either caused by or, more often, made worse by medical error.
That article, too, was met by outrage and was widely quoted and misinterpreted. I think hardly anybody actually read the article. Headlines read "Deaths by Medical Mistakes Claim the Lives of 400,000 People Each Year."
No new data, but a new way to think about it:
As far as I can tell from reading this most recent article, in BMJ, there is no new data. There is just the realization that if this many people are dying of medical error, it should be showing up somehow as a major cause of death, just like heart disease or cancer. The reason that it is not is because the questions that are asked on death certificates do not include anything about whether medical error had occurred. The article, quite correctly, states that this should be documented. Documenting this is the first step toward making major changes that will keep patients safer.
So what did the original article actually say?
When Dr. James' article came out in 2013, I read it and wrote a blog commenting on the study, its methods and what medical error looks like from my experience. Dr. James kindly responded in a comment,
"Thank you for putting my JPS study in an appropriate perspective. Some folks like to sensationalize the results as if these patients die only because of a medical error, and that is not what I wrote or intended."The blog from 2013 was actually pretty good and completely relevant to the recent news release. You may want to read it. It does put the data into perspective.
Patient safety--very very important!
I am glad that this recent article has grabbed international attention for patient safety. What we read in USA Today and the rest of the popular press is not an accurate depiction of the problem, but the problem remains very real. Medical error is contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patients yearly. We, as physicians and healthcare providers, are trusted with the lives of vulnerable people, and it is up to us to build processes that allow our good intentions to be translated into good care.
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