Washington Injury Law Blog

From 2004 through 2006, medical errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of Medicare patients – according to the fifth annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study. This cost the U.S. Medicare program $8.8 billion dollars.

The study showed that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were, on average, 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals. This really emphasizes the importance of checking out the hospital and doctor before you have any major surgery performed.

Among the other findings:

 • Patients had a 20 percent chance of dying as a result of suffering a medical error.
 • The overall death rate among patients who experienced medical error(s) fell by almost 5 percent between 2004 and 2006.
 • However, over that time, there were increases in post-operative respiratory failure, post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, post-operative sepsis (blood infection), and post-operative abdominal wound separation/splitting.
 • The most common types of medical errors were bed sores, failure to rescue, and post-operative respiratory failure – which together accounted for 63.4% of the medical errors.
 • Failure to rescue improved 11.1 percent from 2004 to 2006, while both bed sores and post-operative respiratory failure worsened during that time.
 • If all hospitals performed at the level of the top-ranked hospitals, about 37,214 patient deaths could have been avoided.

Starting Oct. 1, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will stop reimbursing hospitals for the treatment of eight major preventable errors, including objects left in the body after surgery and certain kinds of post-surgical infections.

As a Kirkland Washington Medical Malpractice attorney I have seen the devastation medical malpractice can cause in clients’ lives. I am truly hopeful that when the government and insurance companies stop paying for medical errors we will see dramatic improvement in patient safety in our hospitals and less medical malpractice by our doctors.

Source: HealthDay News post on msn.com