A recent paper
published in the BMJ ranks Medical error as the third leading cause of death
after heart disease and cancer.
CDC compiles
the annual list of the most common cause of deaths in USA, based on death
certificates filled out by physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners,
and coroners.
The health
care provider fills the certificates using an International Classification of
Disease (ICD) code to the cause of death, and unfortunately no ICD-10 code
exists at present for human and system factors.
According to
an article published in Journal of patient safety, premature deaths associated
with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year
costing the nation a colossal $1 trillion each year.
There's also
the 10,000 serious complications cases resulting from medical errors that occur
each day, beside the 1000 death each day.
"Medicine
today invests heavily in information technology, yet the promised improvement
in patient safety and productivity frankly have not been realized," said
Peter Pronovost, MD, senior vice president for Patient Safety and Quality and
director of the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns
Hopkins.
According to
authors although human error is inevitable, but steps can certainly be taken to
reduce its frequency and severity. They suggest making error made and lesson
learnt more visible instead of conducting closed door mortality meetings, so
that healthcare staff is more aware of such complications.But all
these requires a robust data which is difficult in the absence of standardized collection and reporting at the national
level.
The death
certificate can be changed to include an extra column requiring to address
whether a preventable complication have contributed to the cause of death.
Increasing
trained healthcare staff to rescue patients and limiting human error by always
following set protocols in handling an emergency situation.
Beside USA, medical
errors are also leading cause of deaths in Canada and UK. About 117 other
countries in the world also code the cause of death using ICD codes, using it
as an indicator of health status. ICD-10 also has limited codes to capture the
cause of mortality.
The authors
suggest that when a medical error occurs, the physiological cause of death
along with the error leading to it should be captured.
At the same
time the statistics relating to medical error death should be shared nationally
and internationally as other research is shared, creating a common platform to
heightened awareness.
References:
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