Newshour
Newshour Online edited article:
"To err is human," goes the old saying, and human error is a reality in US business. Federal Express is an example. If Federal Express delivered 99 percent of its packages on time (an error rate of just 1 percent) roughly 8 million packages a year would still arrive late. Because of this volume, FedEx long ago adopted sophisticated computerized order entry and tracking systems, part of a company-wide effort to improve performance and eliminate as many mistakes as possible.
A report from the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, says America's health care industry has an urgent need to adopt some of these same quality-improvement practices. The report says the error rate in medicine is unacceptably high.
The report cited previous studies suggesting that mistakes in medicine injure as many as one million Americans each year and kill anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000. That makes medical mistakes a leading cause of preventable death, killing more people each year than breast cancer or motor-vehicle accidents. The report cited instances of errors throughout the health system. Many involve mistakes in medication like hospital staff administering the wrong dose of a drug. The causes of such mistakes are frequently simple but tragic, such as the inability of a nurse or other aide to read a physician's handwriting.
The Institute's report called for comprehensive changes to improve patient safety. In busy hospital emergency rooms, the report said, medications should be stored in the diluted forms in which they're administered to patients, rather than full-strength and potentially lethal. The report also called for the creation of new systems to collect information in hopes of preventing medical errors.
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