Hospital Error Reporting Causes Increase in Patient Safety

New laws requiring public reporting of hospital errors has shone new light on a frightening number of mistakes and accidents that take place in the medical workplace.

The question now is what impact the increased reporting of hospital error will have on the quality of medical service, and how the information will effect the choices made by patients and their families in need of medical service.

Increased reporting of hospital errors will provide essential information for hospitals and medical professionals about areas in which they need improvement. If hospitals and medical professionals don't know where mistakes are being made, it's going to be impossible to take any measures towards preventing the same mistakes in the future.

Only 26 states currently require hospitals to publicly report "never events." "Never events" refer to egregious errors such as operating on the wrong patient, the wrong body part, or leaving a surgical tool inside the patient (Little, 2008).

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that nearly 2 million patients will contract an infection during a hospital stay in 2007.

While reporting of hospital error may not have a great effect on which hospital patients chose, the reporting could be valuable in educating medical professionals as to the most common mistakes in their own hospitals, giving them a chance to examine the problems, the causes, and most importantly, to come up with procedures to avoid mistakes in the future.

We should also consider the increased amount of stress that it will put on medical professionals to know that there will be another set of eyes looking over their shoulder waiting to record their mistake.

In the past two years, there have been numerous reports of patient deaths at South Central Los Angeles' King Drew Hospital. An investigation by the Los Angeles Times revealed that many errors that resulted in patient deaths at the hospital remained secret for more than a decade, sometimes even unknown to the patients families.

In November of 2007, Cedars Sinai Medical Center drew national attention when the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid nearly died because of medication dosing mistake. Cedars Sinai is listed by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top twenty hospitals in the country.

It's unlikely that patients or their families will have much of a choice when they're in an emergency
If hospital were to present the hospital error data when they were offering people options for treatment. When patients are faced with emergency situations likely won't have much of a choice about what hospital they go to regardless of how open hospitals become about their error reporting. The most important thing that should be done with the hospital data is to give it back to the hospitals. Public health representatives could be charged with creating new procedures to increase safety based on the data.

Patients have the right to know if the place where they're having services makes a lot of mistakes on people. On the other hand, how stressful would it be to add on to a mother's stress when being told that her child has to have a serious operation, but that the last time they operated on someone, they operated on the wrong limb.

However, it might create more realistic expectations on behalf of patients' families and might bring to to fore that medical professionals are as fallible as the rest of us

Willingness to share the data is the first step towards increasing patient safety.

Sources:

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=4113684

http://www.cms.hhs.gov/apps/media/press/release.asp?Counter=1863

Little, J. (2008). Hospital errors: what the patient doesn't know might hurt. The Saint Louis Beacon.
Retrieved 5 August, 2008 from: http://www.usnews.com/directories/hospitals