Summary Of To Err Is Human

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) published a report in 1999 entitled “To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System”. The report states that every year in American Hospital about 44000 to 98000 deaths are reported due to hospital errors. The article provides a lot of evidence to support medical errors as one of the main cause of death and injury. Many studies in the article shows that the number of deaths caused due to medical errors exceed those that occur due to motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. The author also addresses the facts that medical errors have been affecting the national health expenditures, the adverse and preventable adverse events represented 4% & 2% of the national expenditure during the year 1996. From the

Though, medical- errors are frequent in hospitals; most of them are manageable, but they have proved to be costly. According to a study, almost 2% of patients admitted experienced a preventable drug event. This has led to an increase in the costs of the hospital, accounting to about $4700 per admission. When these findings are generalized, the hospital costs alone for the preventable adverse drug reactions among the inpatients, for the entire nation accounts to about $2 billion. There have been a number of studies, that prove the errors in prescribing medications by pharmacist also account for article. Most of these studies focus mainly on medical errors occurring at the hospitals and therefore there is a lack of information regarding similar studies in a different

Despite the fact that, healthcare providers, hospitals and health delivery systems all aim at providing safe and quality care, the hapless health consequences suffered due to incorrect medical errors are apprehensive. Numerous blunders are observed due to administration of improper drug (error of commission) and negligence to administer the prescribed drug (error of omission). Many studies, have concluded that the potential for medication related error is directly proportional to the increase in the number of drugs administered. Most of the medication errors go undocumented and unreported, hence such low estimates. Some errors require a computerized surveillance system to be