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HWN Suggests

Reducing Preventable Harm in Hospitals

Each year, in the United States, millions of patients are harmed while receiving care in hospitals. They get infections, experience adverse reactions to drugs, develop dangerous bed sores, or come down with pneumonia from the very ventilators meant to help them breathe.

The estimates of the number of people who die each year as a result of hospital errors have ranged from as many as 98,000 in a landmark Institute of Medicine report from 1999 to as many as 440,000 in a 2013 study.

It’s believed that most of these deaths could be prevented if health care providers always adhered to evidence-informed practices. In recent years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,…

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Featured

 Half of all harm caused by medical care is preventable

About half of all harm that comes to patients as a result of medical care is preventable, according to a review of 70 studies involving more than 330,000 patients in hospitals, specialty clinics and primary care facilities around the world.

Articles of Interest

Medical errors still harm too many people but there are glimpses of real change

Your local hospital is almost certainly much more dangerous than it could be. The latest research says the “frequency of preventable harm remains high,” and danger in the doctor’s office and other outpatient settings is only now starting to be addressed.

Should Hospitals Be More Like Airplanes?

I wanted to see if medicine might learn from other professionals who need to perform their tasks in a swirling, often confusing, high-stakes environment. The aviation industry seemed like a natural place to look, so I spoke to Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the famed “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot.

The hidden harm of health care: air, water, and other pollution

To most people, the health care system is synonymous with healing. But it is also a major source of health-damaging pollution. Every day, U.S. hospitals create nearly 7,000 tons of solid waste, like my gloves and the plastic wrapping around the tools and medicines...

The holiday season can be deadly for hospital patients

A study says you're more likely to die if you're discharged during festive times.

Death by hospital: Who’s right?

The medical establishment had been posting a casualty rate of about 98,000 unnecessary hospital deaths a year since the Institute of Medicine (IOM) came up with that figure in 1999. The IOM report caused a big media stir at the time. There was finger-pointing and soul-searching. There were conferences galore. Commissions and committees and foundations sprang up.

Do Hospitals Do More Harm than Good?

The idea of prevention of injury and disease is a key reason why health care waste management should be a priority in health care institutions. We don’t want to cause harm to a person in the name of providing care. In fact, it should be considered a violation of a person’s human right and a crime against humanity if the public is still exposed to infectious or hazardous waste from hospitals.

Does having flowers in hospital wards harm patients’ health?

The excuses for banning flowers are many and varied. Some don’t stand up to scrutiny. Flower pollen rarely causes any allergic reaction and there are no known cases of hospital-acquired bacterial infections from the water flowers are in. On the other hand, old flowers can be offensively smelly and vases can be knocked over, causing all sorts of hazards.

Hospitals Find a Way to Say, ‘I’m Sorry'

When things go wrong, communication and resolution programs help patients get an apology, an explanation and, sometimes, monetary compensation.

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.

How Hospitals Are Becoming Safer for Children

I walked out of the NICU with my laptop in hand, feeling grateful for people like her who keep our children safe and the rest of us in line.

How Hospitals Can Kill Us

Imagine an institution where the occupants are routinely left immobile, deprived of sleep and fed a diet that is tasteless and nutritionally marginal. Imagine further that they experience the indignity of losing any semblance of privacy and get stuck multiple times a day with needles. Sounds like a brutal prison, right? Yet the same description could apply to a typical U.S. hospital.

How Many Die from Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?

It seems that every time researchers estimate how often a medical mistake contributes to a hospital patient's death, the numbers come out worse.

How to Stop Hospitals From Killing Us

Medical errors kill enough people to fill four jumbo jets a week. A surgeon with five simple ways to make health care safer.

Medical Errors: Are We in Safe Hands?

Medical mistakes happen. Medical professionals are only humans who can err. One gets to wonder how many medical misadventures go unreported!

Medical Record Mix-Ups a Common Problem, Study Finds

The opportunities for the mistakes, which can be deadly, are increasing as health care becomes more complex.

Revised Hours and Workloads for Medical Residents Needed to Prevent Fatigue-Related Mistakes

Altering residents' work hours alone, however, is not a silver bullet for ensuring patient safety, stressed the committee of medical and scientific experts that wrote the report. The committee also called for greater supervision of residents by experienced physicians, limits on patient caseloads based on residents' levels of experience and specialty, and overlap in schedules during shift changes to reduce the chances for error during the handover of patients from one doctor to another

The Alarming Rate of Errors in the ICU

Missed diagnoses may be present in more than a quarter of patients who die in hospital intensive care units, and they may result in the deaths of more people each year than breast cancer.

Watch Out, Hospitals: Medicare's Planning To Punish You If You Misbehave

It used to be that hospitals billed Medicare for the services they provided, and Medicare–I know this is crazy!–simply paid the bills. Those days are rapidly receding into history. Soon, a significant chunk of hospital revenue will be at risk, under a series of Medicare pay-for-performance programs.

When the Hospital Fires the Bullet

More and more hospital guards across the country carry weapons. For Alan Pean, seeking help for mental distress, that resulted in a gunshot to the chest.

Why Hospital Safety Scores Can Do More Harm Than Good

Hospitals and health-care professionals want and need to do better, and yet focusing our efforts on measures whose validity is unknown or poor is not how we should spend our efforts.

Resources

Hospital Harm Improvement Resource

Patients expect hospital care to be safe and for most people it is. However, a small proportion of patients experience some type of unintended harm as a result of the care they receive. The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) have collaborated on a body of work to address gaps in measuring harm and to support patient safety improvement efforts in Canadian hospitals.

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