About half of all harm that comes to patients as a result of medical care is preventable, according to a review of 70 studies involving more than 330,000 patients in hospitals, specialty clinics and primary care facilities around the world.
Maria Panagioti at the University of Manchester, UK, and her colleagues found that about 12 per cent of people experience either physical, emotional or social harm while seeking medical care, and about 6 per cent overall experienced harm that was preventable.
Most studies classified patient harm as preventable if it had an identifiable cause that could be changed or avoided in the future. In the studies included in this analysis, preventable harm included effects from drug or therapy management, diagnosis, invasive medical or surgical procedures, and infections acquired during treatment.
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The highest prevalence of patient harm was reported in intensive care and surgery, and the lowest in obstetrics. About half the harm was classified as mild, about a third was moderate and 12 per cent was considered severe. Surgical procedures accounted for 23 per cent of the cases of preventable medical harm, infections caused 16 per cent, and drug or therapy regimens accounted for about half of the cases.
Variations in the time frames of the studies included in this analysis may not have captured all types of medical harm, and may have influenced their prevalence rates. But the authors of the analysis say they found that about 50 per cent of harm was consistently preventable over the past 19 years.
They note that the excess hospital stays attributable to medical harm in the US have been estimated to total 2.4 million days a year, costing about 拢7.3 billion.
British Medical Journal
