Hospitals only report 14% of medical mistakes

William Atkins
Monday, 09 January 2012 00:14

Science - Health

According to a new study from the U.S. government, hospital employees only report about one out of seven medical errors, which relates to problems for about 9 million people annually.

 

The study, entitled 'Hospital Incident Reporting Systems Do Not Capture Most Patient Harm,' is by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The OIG report states 'Hospital incident reporting systems captured only an estimated 14 percent of the patient harm events experienced by Medicare beneficiaries. Hospitals investigated those reported events that they considered most likely to lead to quality and safety improvements and made few policy or practice changes as a result of reported events.'

And, 'Hospital administrators classified the remaining events (86 percent) as either events that staff did not perceive as reportable (61 percent) or as events that staff commonly report but did not report in this case (25 percent)."

Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, led the study.

Another problem discovered in the study is that when mistakes are made in the hospitals, the employees usually do not change the rules or procedures that were involved in the errors.

Consequently, the mistakes are likely to happen again in the future.

The study was based on records of Medicare patients. Of the results of the study, one of them was that only 5 of 293 reported cases of medical errors led to changes in rules or procedures set up in the hospital - that's only 1.7% of reported problems.

Page two concludes.