Are We Losing the Fight Against Deadly Medical Errors?

A decade after U.S. healthcare authorities boldly declared war on deadly medical errors, little progress has been made in reducing the number of surgical mistakes, prescription errors, and other types of medical mishaps, a leading consumer group says.

In 1999, the Institute of Medicine took dead aim on medical errors and said the number should be cut in half by 2004. But Consumers Union said this week that more than 100,000 people still die every year in the United States due to medical errors. Even that number is just a best-guess estimate, since there is no centralized reporting database for medical errors, officials said.

“As a country we haven’t moved forward as the Institute of Medicine has hoped,” said Lisa McGiffert, campaign director for the Safe Patient Project of Consumers Union.

A new report released by the consumer advocacy group evaluated four recommendations made in 1999 with the goal of making American healthcare safer. Ten years ago, the institute recommended the implementation of safe medication practices, increasing transparency in providing medical care, determine the scope of the medical error problem, and improve patient safety.

According to Consumers Union, the nation is failing on every front.

Failing Grades for Preventing Medical Errors

Giving patients the wrong drug, the wrong dose of a drug, or other medication errors remain a leading cause of medical errors. Less than one in five U.S. hospitals use computerized prescription systems, which have been credited with reducing medication errors by not requiring pharmacists to decipher a physician’s scribbled notes, the report said. Also, the FDA has failed to address issues such as similar labeling of drugs and drug names that sound similar, which can lead to fatal mistakes.

While some progress has been made in increasing accountability and transparency in U.S. healthcare, “the public has not been given the information to know whether we are safer now than we were then,” McGiffert said. For example, 24 states still do not have any medical error reporting systems.

Back in 1999, the Institute of Medicine made measuring the problem of medical errors a key recommendation, but the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality recently reported that patient safety was reduced just 1% since then, the Consumers Union report said.

Lastly, efforts to raise standards for competency in patient safety have failed because there is no process in place to measure the nation’s improvement, McGiffert said.

Not All Bad News

Consumers Union notes that it’s not all gloom and doom when it comes to meeting the 1999 goals for reducing medical errors. There has been progress made in efforts to disclose infection rates. Twenty six states now require disclosure and eight states publish reports of infection rates, the group said.

Also, many hospitals have created their own protocols for reducing medical errors in which the wrong body part is operated on or amputated.

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