Hospital Mistakes Kill Up to 15,000 Yearly in U.S.

Medical errors kill 5,000 to 15,000 patients each year in the U.S., American researchers say.

In a study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers said the previous studies were flawed because there was little consensus among the doctors consulted on what constitutes a deadly error.

Also, the previous studies did not consider whether the patient would have died even if the error hadn't occurred.

Two years ago, a blistering report by the Institute of Medicine said that medical mistakes in hospitals kill up to 98,000 hospitalized Americans a year, and it demanded major changes. The mistakes included prescription drug errors and misused or malfunctioning equipment.

The numbers drew the attention of government officials �� earlier this month the Health and Human Services Department made a series of recommendations to reduce medical errors �� and hospitals nationwide have implemented new protections, such as computer programs to catch errors.

But while improvements are welcome, the number of medical errors that actually cause death is probably overblown, researchers said.

Dr. Rodney A. Hayward, who led the new study as director of the VA Center for Practice Management and Outcomes Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., estimates that between 5,000 and 15,000 deaths annually are due to errors. But he acknowledged those numbers are rough estimates.

"This is not to suggest that medical errors are unimportant," Hayward said. Instead, he said: "The argument is to be careful about what you implement."

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