Change is hard. At some point in time everyone has had to try to change a habit in order to improve at something. That kind of change is hard because people get comfortable in their routines. That kind of change is difficult because people have to act deliberately to avoid slipping into their old habits. That kind of change is difficult because sometimes it begins to change the way people interact with other elements of their lives. It is that kind of change that researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine would like to see at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These researchers are calling on the CDC to add medical errors to its annual list of the top causes of death in the United States.
The research that was done at Johns Hopkins estimates that there are over 250,000 deaths in the United States every year as a result of medical errors. If these were included on the CDC’s list as it exists now it would put medical errors as the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer.
The CDC does not currently list medical errors because its coding system does not recognize them even if they are listed on the death certificate, which all too frequently they are not. The system as it works now defaults to the underlying condition (the reason why the patient was seeking care in the first place), or the acute cause of death and not the error (if there was one) in the published totals. That means someone could come into a hospital with a condition like a heart attack and experience a medical error, such as being given the wrong dosage of a medicine, and the cause of death would be counted as a heart attack not a medical error.
The Johns Hopkins researchers suggest adding a question to death certificates that asks hospitals to specifically indicate if a death was a result of a medical error. The CDC says it needs a compelling reason to change their procedures. The process they have in place now makes it easy to compare U.S. statistics with other countries, and that this would be a difficult change. The researchers argue that this kind of data collection is needed so that the problem of preventable medical errors can be addressed and ultimately reduced.
This kind of change is uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable for doctors to admit that their patients have died due to medical errors. It is uncomfortable for families to learn that a loved one died as a result of a preventable error. It is uncomfortable for the CDC to have to adjust the way they track statistics. However as uncomfortable as this change would be, it would provide data that can justify the research and resources necessary to reduce the number of medical errors so that hopefully one day preventable medical errors won’t be a leading cause of death in the United States.
Sources:
NPR: Medical Errors Are No. 3 Cause Of U.S Deaths, Researchers Say
ProPublica: Study Urges CDC to Revise Count of Deaths from Medical Error
BMJ: Medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US
SOURCE: Chicago Medical Malpractice Law Blog – Read entire story here.
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