Call me a cynic, but this headline doesn’t surprise me: “Study Finds No Progress in Safety at Hospitals.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/health/research/25patient.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper
In a Page One story this week The New York Times reported that a new study — which tracked 10 North Carolina hospitals from 2002 to 2007 — determined that patients were fairly commonly harmed, and those incidents were not declining.
Complications from procedures and drugs, as well as hospital-acquired infections, were the culprit in most cases, according to The Times.
Ironically the study, led by Dr. Christopher Landrigan of the Harvard Medical School, was conducted in North Carolina because hospitals there have instituted a lot of programs to improve patient safety. Instead, the research determined that roughly 18 percent of the patients were harmed by their medical care, and 63.1 percent of their injuries were considered preventable, according to The Times. Some 2.4 percent of the problems caused or contributed to a patient’s death.
The preventable problems included: bad bleeding during an operation; breathing problems caused by a procedure that was not done correctly and a hip dislocation caused by a fall.
The North Carolina hospitals that were part of the study were not named. That was lucky for them, since the research found 588 cases where a patient was harmed by medical care, or 25.1 injuries per 100 admissions, according to The Times.
The study was published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine.
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