Medical Errors!
There is concern about the medical errors in the hospitals in developing countries and developed countries. India is going to increase the number of hospital beds. The number of hospital admissions will increase in the coming years and so are the medical errors. The US Institute of Medicine's landmark 1999 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, estimated that avoidable medical errors contributed annually to 44 000—98 000 deaths in US hospitals. Hospital-based errors were reported as the eighth leading cause of death nationwide, ahead of breast cancer, AIDS, and motor-vehicle accidents. The report put medical errors under the national spotlight.
Who or what is to blame for medical errors and their consequences? Overworked providers, an unnecessarily complex medical system, or uninformed patients? Patients are often handed from one doctor to another and, in the process, communication between providers can break down. Time spent filling out paperwork is time not spent with patients improving the quality of their care. Decision making often does not involve informing a patient about the balance between benefits and harms of individual treatments, or incorporating patients' goals into planned treatment. And it does not help that existing guidelines allow medical residents in the USA to work on average 28 h more per week than junior doctors in countries of the European Union. In India we need to follow the guidelines more strictly and teams should adhere to the standard protocols to reduce the medical errors.
The medical errors can turn out to be very expensive to the society and hospitals. Hospitals must develop protocols and check lists to prevent the medical errors.
There is concern about the medical errors in the hospitals in developing countries and developed countries. India is going to increase the number of hospital beds. The number of hospital admissions will increase in the coming years and so are the medical errors. The US Institute of Medicine's landmark 1999 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, estimated that avoidable medical errors contributed annually to 44 000—98 000 deaths in US hospitals. Hospital-based errors were reported as the eighth leading cause of death nationwide, ahead of breast cancer, AIDS, and motor-vehicle accidents. The report put medical errors under the national spotlight.
Who or what is to blame for medical errors and their consequences? Overworked providers, an unnecessarily complex medical system, or uninformed patients? Patients are often handed from one doctor to another and, in the process, communication between providers can break down. Time spent filling out paperwork is time not spent with patients improving the quality of their care. Decision making often does not involve informing a patient about the balance between benefits and harms of individual treatments, or incorporating patients' goals into planned treatment. And it does not help that existing guidelines allow medical residents in the USA to work on average 28 h more per week than junior doctors in countries of the European Union. In India we need to follow the guidelines more strictly and teams should adhere to the standard protocols to reduce the medical errors.
The medical errors can turn out to be very expensive to the society and hospitals. Hospitals must develop protocols and check lists to prevent the medical errors.
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