More Deaths Comes from Medical Malpractice than Automobile Accidents
It’s hard to believe, but more deaths come from medical errors than deaths from car accidents, breast cancer and AIDS.
In 2000, the Institute of Medicine concluded that medical errors account for more deaths than motor-vehicle accidents per year. The study called for improvements in the medical profession and found the following:
• Preventable adverse events are a leading cause of death in the United States. When extrapolated to the more than 33.6 million admissions to U.S. hospitals, the results of these two studies imply that at least 44,000 and perhaps as many as 98,000 Americans die in the hospital each year as a result of medical errors. Even when using the lower estimate, deaths in the hospital due to preventable adverse events exceed the number attributable to motor-vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516).
• Sizable numbers of Americans are harmed as a result of medical errors. Two studies of large samples of hospital admissions, one in New York and another in Colorado, found that the proportion of hospital admissions experiencing an adverse event, defined as injuries caused by medical management, were 2.9 and 3.7 percent, respectively. The proportion of adverse events attributable to errors (i.e., preventable adverse events) was 58 percent in New York and 53 percent in Colorado