Ever since the publication of the infamous 2016 BMJ opinion piece by Makary claiming medical error should be considered the third leading cause of death in the US, the debate on the true incidence of deaths caused by medical error has been raging. Many, including me, felt the Makary estimate of 251,000 deaths per year from medical error was grossly inflated. For example, Makary extrapolated the number of deaths from three outdated studies with a total of just 35 deaths, and medical error was not well-defined.
A new paper in BMJ Open Access by investigators from the UK looked at 70 studies involving 337,025 patients mostly treated in general hospitals. Of that total, 47,148 suffered harm with 25,977 (55%) of harms judged as preventable.
The authors concluded “The pooled prevalence for preventable patient harm was 6% (95% confidence interval 5% to 7%). A pooled proportion of 12% (9% to 15%) of preventable patient harm was severe or led to death.” I’ll do the math; 12% of 6% is 0.72% or just over 2400 preventable severe harms and deaths.
A recent literature review on the website Healthy Debate Canada cited three papers estimating incidence of preventable deaths due to medical error ranged from less than 1% to 5.2% and said “This would correspond to 15,000-35,000 deaths per year in the US, an order of magnitude lower than the BMJ estimate.”
Even one preventable death is too many. However, inflated figures like 251,000 deaths or even 440,000, as a 2013 paper claimed, undermine public confidence in medical care.
Some examples. The Canadian authors said calling medical error “the third leading cause of death” in the US enabled supporters of the NRA to say doctors are more harmful than guns. Naturopaths and alternative news sites warned about the dangers of our health system. I blogged about an article from RT, the English language Russian “news” website, headlined “Medical errors kill hundreds of thousands each year in the US.”
From Healthy Debate: “In-hospital deaths from medical error are a small subset of all medical errors, and non-fatal errors cause considerable harm to patients. Considering that most of health care occurs in the ambulatory setting, there is an even larger potential for error to cause harm outside of hospitals.” Focusing too much on in-hospital deaths from error may direct attention away from other areas of quality improvement.
Medical error is not the third leading cause of death in the US. Will people stop saying it is? I doubt it. A 2018 paper published in Science looked at 126,000 story links tweeted by 3 million people and found “falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.”
Suggested Reading:
The controversy around estimating deaths from medical error. Link.
Prevalence, severity, and nature of preventable patient harm across medical care settings. Link
“Medical errors kill hundreds of thousands each year in the US.” Link
Estimating deaths due to medical air: the ongoing controversy and why it matters. Link.
Are there really 250,000 preventable deaths per year in US hospitals? Link.
More proof medical error is not the third leading cause of death. Link.
Deciding whether adverse advents are preventable or not. Link.
Medical errors and deaths: Is the problem getting worse? Link.
Skeptical Scalpel is a retired surgeon and was a surgical department chairman and residency program director for many years. He is board-certified in general surgery and a surgical sub-specialty and has re-certified in both several times. For the last 8 years, he has been blogging at SkepticalScalpel.blogspot.com and tweeting as @SkepticScalpel. His blog has had more than 3,000,000 page views, and he has over 19,000 followers on Twitter.
SkepticalScalpel
nonsense…
all in order to continue to belittle the medical profession and control us…how low we have gone…I have not gotten a pay raise in years…
We have allowed our independence to be taken away, we have almost no say in what happens in our practice…
sadly many of us are just too ignorant, brainwashed to believe otherwise..
As a primary care physician for more than 20 years, I have observed an uncomfortable amount of medical errors occurring in hospital settings, during patient transitions, as outpatients and in nursing homes; not all fatalities but quite serious nonetheless.
The paper, even if an over-extrapolation on the exact number of deaths, has led to more vigilance from both physicians, hospitals and patients, but we have a long way to go.
I advise my patients not to have blind faith in physicians, including myself. No news does not necessarily mean good news with regard to test results and I advise all patients to call within 10 days and to get copies of all of their results. I advise patients to run their own medication interaction analysis every time a physician adds a medication. I advise patients to ask what their vital signs are before they are discharged (had a post-surgical patient discharged with temp of 101.9 and O2 Sat 92 readmitted with PE) and to carefully review discharge instructions so that they can ask questions.
In an ideal world, all patients would not only have medical advocates, but would have access to a national, accredited website containing detailed information about medical conditions, expected standard of care, medication interaction analyzer, prevention guidelines, how to read a blood test and have an associated app so that patients can actually accrue points for ‘learning’. Right now patients are scolded for referring to Dr. Google, but we offer them no alternative other than navigating the expensive, fragmented medical system.
Don’t you think it would be more useful to focus on how we can reduce medical errors rather than worrying about the optics of this research paper?
You make some good points. However, why can’t we do both?
I believe that there are errors covered up so that some deaths/adverse effects are not truly classified as preventable. I am a nurse and was a patient with an adverse effect after a lap chole. To make a long story short was in the hospital for 9 days after surgery, home for approximately 8 hours, back to ER then ICU for 5 days and then the floor for another 5 days.
I am sorry that you had a bad experience. I hope you have fully recovered. In most hospitals, a 9-day stay after a lap chole and an unplanned readmission 8 hours after discharge would have been investigated and properly categorized if errors had occurred. I suggest you ask the hospital’s ombudsman or risk management department for the results of that investigation. Please let me know what you find out. Good luck.