100 000 die 'by mistake'

2005-05-19 08:00

Washington - Medical errors still kill around 100 000 people annually in the United States, according to a study on Wednesday published in the Journal of the Medical Association.

While certain hospitals have made significant improvement after a 2000 study identified up to 98 000 deaths a year were caused by medical practitioners' negligence, the death rate remains too high generally, researchers found.

"All hospitals have implemented some new practices to improve safety," the report said, noting as an example fewer cases of accidental injection with concentrated potassium chloride after the substance was removed from nursing unit shelves.

The study's authors found that computerising prescriptions meant errors were down 81% in some centres. Putting a pharmacist in with medical teams had also seen allergic reactions from certain medications drop by 78%.

But while some centres have managed to reduce deaths and illness from safety lapses by as much as 93%, the efforts only affect safety "at the margin, their overall impact is hard to see in national statistics."

Hospital infections alone "most of which are preventable, account for more than 90 000 deaths per year, and hospital acquired bloodstream infections alone may rank as the eight leading cause of death in the United States," it said.

"The groundwork for improving safety has been laid these past five years but progress is frustratingly slow," the report by co-authors in the study Lucian Leape of Harvard School of Public Health and Donald Berwick of the Harvard Medical School found.

"Building a culture of safety is proving to be an immense task and the barriers are formidable. Whether significant progress will be achieved in the next five years depends on how successfully those barriers are addressed."

- AFP