Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them: Don't Be a Statistic - Hardcover

Graedon, Joe; Graedon, Teresa, Ph.D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307460916 ISBN 13: 9780307460912

Verlag: Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

A primary care doctor is skeptical of his patient’s concerns. A hospital nurse or intern is unaware of a drug’s potential side effects. A physician makes the most “common” diagnosis while overlooking the signs of a rarer and more serious illness, and the patient doesn’t see the necessary specialist until it’s too late. A pharmacist dispenses the wrong drug and a patient dies as a result.

Sadly, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Each year, 6.1 million Americans are harmed by diagnostic mistakes, drug disasters, and medical treatments. A decade ago, the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 98,000 people died in hospitals each year from preventable medical errors. And new research from the University of Utah, HealthGrades of Denver, and elsewhere suggests the toll is much higher.
Patient advocates and bestselling authors Joe and Teresa Graedon came face-to-face with the tragic consequences of doctors’ screwups when Joe’s mother died in Duke Hospital—one of the best in the world—due to a disastrous series of entirely preventable errors. In Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them, the Graedons expose the most common medical mistakes, from doctor’s offices and hospitals to the pharmacy counters and nursing homes. Patients across the country shared their riveting horror stories, and doctors recounted the disastrous—and sometimes deadly—consequences of their colleagues’ oversights and errors. While many patients feel vulnerable and dependent on their health care providers, this book is a startling wake-up call to how wrong doctors can be.

The good news is that we can protect ourselves, and our loved ones, by being educated and vigilant medical consumers. The Graedons give patients the specific, practical steps they need to take to ensure their safety: the questions to ask a specialist before getting a final diagnosis, tips for promoting good communication with your doctor, presurgery checklists, how to avoid deadly drug interactions, and much more.

Whether you’re sick or healthy, young or old, a parent of a young child, or caring for an elderly loved one, Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them is an eye-opening look at the medical mistakes that can truly affect any of us—and an empowering guide that explains what we can do about it.

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JOE GRAEDON, M.S., is one of the country’s leading consumer pharmacology experts and a frequent speaker on topics including pharmaceuticals, nutrition, and home remedies. TERESA GRAEDON, Ph.D., is a medical anthropologist. Together, they are bestselling coauthors, syndicated newspaper columnists, and award-winning internationally syndicated radio talk-show hosts. Their media appearances include Dateline NBC, Extra, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, Today, and NBC Evening News. The Graedons maintain an interactive website at www.PeoplesPharmacy.com.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Statistics are people with the tears wiped away. -IRVING SELIKOFF, MD

Imagine the headlines today if a jumbo jet crashed and killed everyone on board. Now imagine three jumbo jets crashing on the same day. There would be cries of outrage, demands for explanations, investigations, and immediate corrections to air traffic safety.

The death toll from health care screwups adds up to at least 500,000 Americans annually. That is the equivalent of more than three jumbo jets crashing every day of the year (or over 1,000 jets annually). Because these individuals are dying at home, in hospitals, or in nursing homes, no one is counting the bodies. There is no outrage, no plan to change a system that allows too many to die unnecessarily. The medical profession seems largely immune to the consequences of its errors.

If our calculations are correct, it means that medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the United States, right after heart disease (631,636) and cancer (559,888) and way ahead of strokes, the next big killer (137,110).1 Teasing out the total number of people dying from health care errors turns out to be incredibly difficult. In the airline industry, when a plane crashes, the death toll is known almost immediately. But to figure out how many people die each year because of misdiagnosis, medication mistakes, preventable infections, oversights, suboptimal treatment, and just plain mess-ups, we need to consider a range of statistics. There is no one place to go for such data, and the estimates that we found vary enormously.

To Err Is Human

In 1999, an organization of the country's leading health experts issued an astonishing report titled To Err Is Human.2 The Institute of Medicine (IOM), tasked with making unbiased policy recommendations to improve the health of Americans, estimated that as many as 98,000 citizens died each year in hospitals and 1 million patients were injured from a range of mistakes. The report created a firestorm of controversy inside and outside the medical community. There was a lot of hand wringing, a fair amount of denial, and eventually some brainstorming about how to improve things.

Five years later, two of the country's leading safety experts, Lucian Leape, MD, and Donald Berwick, MD, wrote a tough article in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled: "Five Years After To Err Is Human: What Have We Learned?" The answer: not much. Their conclusion: still no nationwide monitoring system and little evidence of patient safety improvement.3

Then came another bombshell. A leading independent health care ratings organization called HealthGrades reviewed Medicare data from hospitals around the country and concluded that the IOM report had grossly underestimated the number of deaths. The 2004 report concluded that the death rate was roughly twice the previous number, or an average of 195,000 citizens dying annually from preventable in- hospital medical errors.4

Another investigative report released by journalists from the Hearst Corporation in 2009, titled Dead by Mistake, estimated that 200,000 Americans died that year from hospital infections and preventable medical errors.5 In 2010, an in-depth study from the Department of Health and Human Services estimated that 134,000 Medicare hospital patients are harmed from medical care each month and 180,000 die every year as a result.6 Almost half the deaths were preventable. This mortality number includes only senior citizens, so the total annual mortality resulting from medical care is substantially higher.

More alarming than the incredible numbers of deaths was the lobbying effort by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and other special-interest groups that blocked any organized system for reporting medical errors.7 A decade after all the agonizing and brainstorming by eminent experts, we still lack a way of actually detecting and tracking medical screwups. According to Christopher Landrigan, MD, a leading patient safety investigator, "We need a monitoring system that is mandatory. There has to be some mechanism for federal-level reporting, where hospitals across the country are held to it."8

Without some sort of compulsory reporting system, hospitals may miss or ignore "93 percent of events that cause either permanent or temporary harm to a patient."9 That was the conclusion the Inspector General of Health and Human Services made based on a careful review of 278 Medicare hospitalizations.10 A 2010 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that harm to patients resulting from medical care remains common, even in places where significant resources have been devoted to improving safety.11 Nearly one in five hospital patients in the study suffered harm, and two-fifths of those injuries could have been prevented.12 A study in 2011 estimated that 6.1 million Americans are injured each year due to medical misadventures.13

Dead by Mistake Key Findings

"20 states have no medical error reporting at all, five states have voluntary reporting systems and five are developing reporting systems.

"Of the 20 states that require medical error reporting, hospitals report only a tiny percentage of their mistakes, standards vary wildly and enforcement is often nonexistent.

"In terms of public disclosure, 45 states currently do not release hospital-specific information.

"Only 17 states have systematic adverse-event reporting systems that are transparent enough to be useful to consumers."14

What these data mean is that we have no idea how many people are actually dying from medical mess-ups. And, dear reader, please note that everything we have been discussing until now has to do with hospitals. It does not include nursing homes (where oversight is far less rigorous and where mishaps rarely get reported) or outpatient settings such as urgent care centers, clinics, private offices, pharmacies, or surgical centers, where physicians and other health care providers have no requirement (and a disincentive) to acknowledge or report mistakes. Even in hospitals, doctors are far less likely to report medical errors than nurses. In one study, "registered nurses provided nearly half of the reports; physicians contributed less than 2 percent."15 In another study of Massachusetts hospitals, physicians disclosed less than one-third of preventable adverse events.16

It would be reasonable to conclude that measuring medical mistakes is imprecise. In fact, research shows that "never events," that is, events that should never happen, are severely underreported. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an organization that promotes patient safety, has developed a standardized approach to reviewing patient records to detect signals of problems in medical care. This technique, known as the Global Trigger Tool, was used in one study to review approximately eight hundred patient records. The Global Trigger Tool identified more than 350 medical errors, while a computerized record review found thirty-five in the same set of records. Voluntary reporting had revealed only four of these mistakes. It's little wonder that the investigators concluded that relying on voluntary reporting alone could result in serious misjudgments of patient safety.17 In fact, 33 percent of the patients in this study experienced adverse events. This is ten times more than prior studies have found.

The Tip of the Iceberg

As we did our research for this book, we began to sense we were seeing only the tip of the error iceberg. To get a more comprehensive overview of the entire problem, we talked with Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, one of the country's leading experts on patient safety. Dr. Pronovost is a professor of medicine at the Johns...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307460916
• ISBN 13: 9780307460912
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 314
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar