Fatal Medical Errors Reported Six Times More Deadly than
Guns

By most recent government reports, fatalities associated
with firearms have averaged around 30,000 Americans a year
in recent years, including homicides, suicides, justifiable
and excusable homicides and accidents.

That rate of what are considered preventable deaths has
been the primary rationale for most of the demands for more
restrictive gun control laws.

However, a recent study of deaths caused by medical errors,
as reported by The Wall Street Journal in late July, claimed
that six times more people die as a result of preventable
medical errors in US Hospitals.

The study by Health Grades Inc., a Colorado-based
health-care consulting firm, claims that medical errors in
US hospitals contributed to almost 600,000 patient deaths
over a three-year period. That number is double the number
of deaths from similar causes recorded in a study by the
Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2000.

Some experts question the numbers and methodology in the
Health Grade study, but admit that medical errors remain a
major problem in hospitals across the country.

?Any way you look at it, medical errors are a frightening
problem, The Journal quoted Kenneth Kizer, president of
National Quality Forum, a nonprofit group seeking national
standards for measurement and public reporting of
health-care performance data.

Health Grades said an average of 195,000 patients a year
died from preventable hospital errors, the equivalent of
530 people a day, about 22 every hour. The earlier IOM
study estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 preventable deaths
occurred every year due to medical errors.

The IOM study extrapolated figures based on findings from
three states. The Health Grades study?based on data from 37
million Medicare patients in every state over three
years?concludes that there was not a huge jump in deaths
from hospital errors since the IOM study, but that the
previous estimates was too low. While the Health Grade
study was based on patients over 65, the data were adjusted
to compensate for age.

The majority of patients who died in the Health Grades study
were taken from a medical coding called ?failure to rescue,?
which refers to errors in diagnosing or treating illness
that occurs after an operation.