Report Finds Most Errors at Hospitals Go Unreported New York Times
" . . estimated that more than 130,000 Medicare beneficiaries experienced one or more adverse events in hospitals in a single month.”
Adverse events include
- medication errors,
- severe bedsores,
- infections that patients acquire in hospitals,
- delirium resulting from overuse of painkillers and
- excessive bleeding linked to improper use of blood thinners.
Reasons for not reporting the error included:
- employees do not recognize “what constitutes patient harm”
- do not realize that particular events harmed patients
- employees assumed someone else would report the episode
- they thought it was so common that it did not need to be reported
- “suspected that the events were isolated incidents unlikely to recur.”