Medical Malpractice News

The Best Offense Is a Good Defense Against Medical Errors

Let's face it, we all make mistakes. Mistakes happen in hospitals, they happen in outpatient clinics, they happen in nursing homes and home care, and they happen in self-care. We as clinicians need to acknowledge that they happen. The challenge is to avoid them, and when mistakes do occur, to prevent them from causing harm to our patients. More people die from errors than from auto accidents (which cause 43,000 deaths a year). More people die from errors than breast cancer (that's 42,000). More people die from errors than from AIDS (that's 16,000). But if you think about the investment that we're making in research to understand why these errors are made and what we can do to prevent them, that investment pales in comparison to what we're spending on breast cancer or AIDS.

The IOM report is getting a lot of attention. Much of the attention focuses on "horror stories"—such as the amputation of the wrong leg or fatal drug overdoses. But most errors are less obvious. They may be diagnostic errors. Or they may be surgical mistakes—such as a nicked artery or nerve. Or there may be errors in drug treatment, such as a patient being prescribed two medications that interact to cause an adverse reaction, when one drug could easily have been substituted with an appropriate alternative. In fact, research suggests that half of all adverse drug reactions are preventable.

Or patients themselves can be responsible for errors, such as when patients cannot read the dosage instructions on medicine bottles. Recent research shows that 20 percent of patients are not literate enough to read, understand, and follow their prescription directions.Remember that science shows us that errors are a systems problem. The solution requires a system-wide response from everyone involved in health care. The entire health care team must meet the challenge of working to reduce errors.

Please contact us if anyone you know has suffered from debilitating injuries due to medical malpractice in Alaska.

	Did You Know?
	Drug-switching practices happen and are very dangerous Another public-spirited drug giant, Merck, was forced to pay a settlement of $1.9 million to 17 states in 1995 for drug-switching practices involving its Medco subsidiary. Medco pharmacists, who had given excessively favorable treatment to Merck products, were thereafter required to reveal their Merck connection to their customers.