Medical errors are referred to as the deviation from the care procedure that may harm the patient’s usage of the wrong plan for the accomplishment of a specific objective (planning error), the failure of any planned action (execution error), or zero accomplishment of the designed objective, or an unintended act (either of commission or omission).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a yearly list of the most common reasons for death in the United States. This list has been generated through analysis of death certificates mostly filled out by coroners, medical examiners, funeral directors, and physicians.
However, some death causes like the system and human factors are not considered in this list. However, the science of safety has perceived that at times patient deaths can be directly due to inadequate skills, poor judgment, diagnostic errors, and communication breakdowns. Therefore, medical errors that have been contributing significantly to deaths in the U.S. must be considered.
Medical Errors haunting the United States
It is also important to consider that both at the system or individual level, damages to the patient can be resulted due to medical errors. Thereby, expansion within the taxonomy of error has been considered for useful classification of preventable events and factors.
Statistics have found medical errors as one of the leading death tolls in the U.S. resulting in around 250,000 deaths. Increasing statistics have made medical errors one of the crucial death cause after cancer and heart disease. This eventually has resulted in severe criticisms by advocates along with the demand for better effective legislation for patients’ safety.
Moreover, an increasing lack of public attention to the issue has also led to a lack of accounting by the CDC. As a consequence, policies relative to patient safety are focused on by only a few lawmakers along with only limited resources targeted at the issue.
However, the issue of the inaccuracy of the data prevails even though data has been appropriately collected by the CDC. As in the case of the issuance of death certificates self-reporting by hospitals and doctors emerges as one of the most dependable factors by the CDC.
Moreover, mistakes are most likely to be unadmitted by any hospital or doctor who in reality may be the key reason behind the patient’s death. This eventually may also not be recorded on the death certificate. Therefore, an experienced medical malpractice attorney is one of the effective methods for encouraging hospitals and doctors to realize and practice their accountability for the deaths resulted due to medical errors like surgery errors, anesthesia errors, and medication errors.
