Error in Healthcare, Essay Example

When someone goes to be treated by a healthcare professional either in the office or in the hospital, they expect that they will feel better after receiving care or treatment. Many people don’t seek out medical care unless there is a problem they recognize and that is causing them fear, discomfort or pain. Regular checkups often aren’t scheduled as a number of individuals believe that they will need to visit a healthcare provider during the course of the year and the checkup can just be taken care of when that occurs. While there are reports on the news of mistakes made by health care professionals, sometimes serious mistakes that can lead to fatality, no one believes it will happen to them.

Early reports of medical error has approximated that over one million people are injured in hospitals in this country each year with 150,000 of them dying from their injury. The majority of these, it has been suggested, are due to medication errors (Holland & DeGruy, 1997). In the U.S. alone it has been recently estimated that as many as 440,000 people treated in hospitals suffer preventable harm that leads to their death due to medical errors each year. This suggests that preventable healthcare related errors are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer (James, 2013.) This is extremely concerning not only due to how many people in hospitals lose their lives when it can be prevented, but also because this only estimates mortality rates in hospitals. Given that the estimate does not include other settings and other negative outcomes which includes all types of preventable harm to patients, it is impossible to determine how many people might be affected by healthcare error each year.

It has also been shown that many hospitals not only don’t report errors, they encourage healthcare providers to not disclose them. The author suggested that this was a result of the type of leadership that is involved in supervising providers. When the supervisor used authoritarian strategies making nurses feel worse than they already did, increasing negative emotion without addressing the actual mistake it was more likely that nurses would keep their own mistakes and those of colleagues secret. When supervisors addressed the situation and helped nurses learn how to prevent similar mistakes from occurring again, nurses were more likely to disclose mistakes. Hospitals hiring authoritarian supervisors were more likely to encourage healthcare providers in their employ to maintain secrecy should a mistake occur (Lambert, 2001).

It is also concerning that when researching health care errors online, the majority of articles seem to focus on the economic cost of these errors not the human costs. Additionally most of the articles available appear to focus on decreasing error not eliminating it. The most common advice to professionals who make a healthcare related error is to “forgive yourself” since “no one is perfect,” (e.g. Younberg, 2013), not to analyze the mistake and learn not to make the same one in the future.

After seeing what was available online regarding healthcare errors in terms of learning to forgive yourself when one is committed instead of learning how not to do this in the future and the focus on the financial costs of these mistakes made me feel angry. Given that the recent article written by James, (2013), estimated a huge number of hospital deaths from healthcare error which were preventable. This isn’t even taking into account all the other preventable errors which are being committed such as medication prescription errors.

I don’t believe that we should accept errors in healthcare as inevitable. When we do that, it will let all of us off the hood for mistakes making it seem less crucial when we do make a mistake. I don’t believe anyone is beyond making a mistake but there should be consequences that everyone who provides healthcare is made aware of. Knowing that there will be consequences of our actions especially in regard to making mistakes will provide the incentive to be extra careful to avoid error and provide the highest quality care possible.

Resources

Holland, E. G., & DeGruy, D. (1997). Drug-induced disorders, American Family Physician, 15, 1781- 1992.

James, J. T. (2013). A new, evidence-based estimate of patient harms associated with hospital care. Journal of Patient Safety, 9, 122-8. doi: 10.1097/PTS.0b013e3182948a69.

Lambert, C. (2001). Secret errors kill. Harvard Magazine. Retrieved from http://harvardmagazine.com/2001/03/secret-errors-kill.html

Younberg, B. J., (Ed.). 2013. Patient Safety Handbook, Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett Learning.