Hospital errors
The Indianapolis Star‘s Tammy Webber reports that medical errors will be treated differently after Jan. 1, “when a new Indiana law will require hospitals to report more than two dozen types of mistakes.”
The state will make the errors at each hospital available for public review — making Indiana only the second state in the nation to do so. Minnesota was the first. Indiana’s first report is expected in 2007.
The point of it all: The more that’s known about how medical mistakes happen, the better the odds of preventing errors.
Surgery on the wrong body part or patient are among those that must now be reported in Indiana. In a 2003 survey of final year medical residents, sixty-two percent reported that liability issues were their top concern, surpassing any other concern, and representing an increase of over three fold from 2001.1
Is it justified? If medical errors were recognized as a cause of death by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) in its annual National Vital Statistics Report, medical errors would be ranked as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States and outrank deaths due to breast cancer, AIDS, motor vehicle accidents, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, Alzheimer’s disease, and renal disease.2
1Meritt, Hawkins & Assoc., Summary Report: 2003 Survey of Final Year Med. Residents 5 (2003).
2Steve Lohr, Bush’s Next Target: Malpractice Lawyers, N.Y. Times, Feb. 27, 2001, at 31.
