The results of a recent study of ten North Carolina hospitals published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) reveal no statistically significant improvements to patient safety in the decade since the last major review. Studying thousands of patient cases from 2002 through 2007, the authors revealed a rate of 25.1 incidents of preventable harm for every 100 admissions.
The study, "Temporal Trends in Rates of Patient Harm Resulting from Medical Care," supervised by public health specialists from Harvard Medical School and Stanford University School of Medicine, concluded that "harms remain common, with little evidence of widespread improvement." The authors strongly suggested that greater efforts must be made to integrate effective safety strategies into everyday practice, and called for closer scrutiny of health care safety going forward.
The authors chose North Carolina as the subject region for their study due to its high rate of hospital enrollment in patient safety improvement efforts. While they characterized the failure to find improvement in such an area as disappointing, they found it not surprising due to the widespread failure by hospitals to adopt evidence-based safety practices. Some examples:
- Electronic record keeping: only 1.5 percent of U.S. hospitals utilize a comprehensive electronic medical record keeping system; only 9.1 percent have put in place basic electronic record systems; and only 17 percent have the ability to allow providers to enter medical information.
- Overworked medical professionals: Doctors-in-training and nurses work in excess of a level of hours that is proven to be safe.
- Cleanliness and best practices: Simple strategies such as hand washing are inconsistently implemented in many medical centers.
Patients are vulnerable to medical mistakes at any stage in the process, from emergency room errors to anesthesia errors to retained surgical instruments, and at any stage in a person's life, from birth injury to nursing home negligence.
Lawyers Advocate for Better Patient Safety by Holding Hospitals Accountable
When an injured patient or surviving family member contacts a medical malpractice lawyer about the harm they have suffered, it is obvious that current hospital safety programs are not protecting patients as they should. The recent study in the NEJM confirms the hazards of negligent practices and the alarming rate at which they occur.
The long term consequences of preventable hospital errors and malpractice can be devastating. The extra burdens on patients or their loved ones caused by unnecessary medical expenses, lost wages and permanent injury or death are severe. For that reason, a robust legal liability system designed to bring the truth to light is a vital component of the American health care system.
