subject: Growing Awareness Encouraging the Prevention of Medical Errors [print this page] Growing Awareness Encouraging the Prevention of Medical Errors
Medical errors tend to occur relatively often within the health care industry, and have been directly responsible for a large number of deaths and additional injuries. In fact, one report from the Institute of Medicine claimed that between 44 and 98 thousand people in the US die every year because of some form of medical error. Although these shocking statistics might cause you to believe that some type of organization would have been created to address and resolve these issues, the truth is that there are none as of yet. This means that the prevention of medical errors is largely the responsibility of doctors, surgeons, and their assistants.
To combat this problem, many health care facilities have insisted that their staff be trained in the prevention of medical errors. There are a wide range of courses available from universities and educational facilities throughout the world that offer comprehensive information on some of the most common medical errors and how to go about taking all of the precautionary measures available to prevent them from occurring. Much of this information has been obtained from many decades of trial and error. Some of it is just plain common sense. Either way, the information contained within these courses is important and should be paid attention to by those interested in pursuing a career within the health care industry.
There are a wide range of different errors experienced within the health care industry, and well over half of these are largely preventable. Typical errors include prescribing the wrong medicine for patients, delivering a meal containing salt to a patient with notable high blood pressure, infections occurring after surgery has taken place due to inadequate cleaning of the wound, or administering a blood transfusion with a blood type that is incompatible with the patient. Granted, there is a notable amount of variation between the threat level of each of these errors, but it is no doubt that all of them should be noted in order to facilitate the prevention of medical errors.
It is argued that by improving the methods by which care is delivered to patients, the prevention of medical errors can be accomplished more effectively. Doctors, nurses, surgeons, and hospital staff are human and they make mistakes like all humans do. However, because they are considered to be trained professionals, when a medical accident occurs they are largely subject to blame. It is important to recognize that errors have occurred consistently throughout the history of modern medicine, but only in recent times are people starting to become more and more aware of these problems. Finding a solution involves not in placing blame on individuals, but in developing safer forms of care administration, so that the probabilities of such errors occurring can be effectively reduced.
Ways to improve these systems might include developing computerized systems to keep track of the specific care and prescription needs required by each patient or establishing more thorough testing protocols so as to provide the caretaker with better information prior to making a decision. If awareness continues to be raised and organizations step forward to design solutions, the prevention of medical errors may become much more standard in health care facilities throughout the world.
