One-third of Nursing Home Patients Suffer From Medical Errors

One-third of Nursing Home Patients Suffer From Medical Errors

Medicare patients suffer from widespread medical mistakes at nursing homes

One-third of all Medicare patients treated at skilled nursing facilities suffered some form of harm from medication errors, medical mistakes or infections, according to a government investigation that raises red flags about the quality of America’s health care as the industry transitions to Obamacare.

The investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found that 59 percent of the adverse patient events were preventable and that more than half required patients to be admitted to care at a hospital or other facility.

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Numerous patients — about 1.5 percent of those exposed to harm — died as a result of the mistakes, the report found.

The adverse events are harmful to taxpayers as well, costing an estimated $2.8 billion a year in additional hospitalizations, the report found.

Nursing homes are the most common type of skilled nursing facilities or SNFs, which are a growing part of America’s medical system as the baby-boomer generation ages. President Obama’s health care law envisions them continuing to play an important role going forward, raising the stakes for the problems unmasked in the investigation.

“Because many of the events that we identified were preventable, our study confirms the need and opportunity for SNFs to significantly reduce the incidence of resident-harm events,” the inspector general concluded.

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Investigators said 22 percent of Medicare patients developed serious medical problems as a result of their stay, many of which required hospitalization to treat.

The most common mistake investigators found had to do with medication, usually with nursing staff giving patients the wrong kind or wrong dosages, or patients having an allergic reaction to the meds.

Medicare, one of the largest government programs in terms of spending, has often drawn criticism from Capitol Hill lawmakers who say the program isn’t doing enough to combat waste or isn’t transparent.

“Taxpayers have a right to see how their dollars are being spent,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, a leading advocate for spending reform, last year. “There shouldn’t be a special exception for hard-earned dollars that happen to be spent through Medicare.”

Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, said at a committee hearing last year that the government must be mindful of the cost of the program and how much mistakes can not only hurt patients, but cost taxpayers.

“As more and more baby boomers retire and health care costs continue to rise, Medicare spending could reach $1 trillion by 2023,” he said.  “Reducing hospital readmissions will not only save the Medicare program billions, it will save beneficiaries from potential infection and further out-of-pocket expense.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they are compiling lists of the most common medical mistakes, and preparing better training for doctors on how to avoid the mishaps.

“CMS fully concurs with [the inspector general] on the importance of identifying avoidable adverse events among nursing-home residents and improving the quality of life and care for nursing-home residents,” a response from the agency said.

The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, will require nursing homes and similar facilities to report their safety records to federal watchdogs. The inspector general said it’s too soon to tell if this will have a noticeable impact on reducing medical mistakes.

In addition to the harm done to patients, inspectors said, the mistakes were a large financial burden on Medicare for having to pay for hospital treatment.

“Most of these residents died at hospitals rather than in the SNFs where the harm occurred, having been transferred back to the hospitals for higher-level treatment as a result of the event,” the inspector general said.

Hospital trips owning to mistakes by medical staff cost taxpayers $2.8 billion in a single year, according to the report. But, the inspector general warned, “the full costs associated with these events are likely greater than our estimate.”

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The Truth About Gun and Doctors

There are 32K gun deaths in the US and 16K of them are suicides The rest are accidental shootings justifiable homicide and illegal killings so the fact is there really is not an epidemic of gun violence.

There are more guns but less gun owners than anytime in our history. There are 80 million gun owners currently.

In every mass shooting the common thread was prescription drugs. Mass shootings are a recent thing and so is the proliferation of psych meds. 

Suicides are 12 in 100,000 among the population. Most suicides are in the 45+ population. Military suicides are 34 per 100,000 which is nearly 3 times the national average. The common thread is psych meds and in the case of soldiers and vets that drug is Seroquel.

Let's look at some real carnage: 

440.000 deaths are from medical errors alone. Link

Medical errors net the medical industry an extra 1 TRILLION dollars per year. LINK

At least 200,000 people die from hospital acquired infections and 2 million get infected and that is based on the 26 states that report. There are no federal laws in AmeriKKKa requiring the reporting of nosocomial infections.

Both of Proud FA's parents were killed by medical errors as was a dear friend of ours.

There are 80 million gun owners in the US and 700,000 MDs. Draw your own conclusions.

Medical Error In America

Medical Error Statistics

Alarming Trend: Medical Errors Have Increased in the U.S.

By Editor, on April 16th, 2011

A new editorial in The Lancet medical journal cites staggering statistics that medical errors now occur in as many one-third of all U.S. hospitalizations.
The editors present other attention-getting statistics from several scientific studies establishing that medical errors remain a serious problem in the U.S. and appear to have increased over the last 10 years, despite national attention called to this problem.
The Lancet editors ask, “Why?” And, they make some suggestions that should well be considered by medical professionals, patients and caregivers, and policy makers in the U.S.

Keep in mind that 120,000 deaths from medical errors each year is based only on what gets reported. Most deaths from medical errors get covered up. Doctors are clever liars.

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The Alarming Statistics:
The editorial, entitled, “Medical errors in the USA: human or systemic?“, appears in the April 16, 2011 Issue of The Lancet. It cites and describes the findings of several published studies on medical errors in the U.S. by recognized U.S. scientific and professional sources. Among them are the following:

• The US Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, estimated that avoidable medical errors contributed annually to 44,000—98,000 deaths in US hospitals. Hospital errors were reported to constitute the eighth leading cause of death nationally, accounting for more U.S. deaths than breast cancer, AIDS, and motor-vehicle accidents. This drew national attention to the problem.
• Yet, more than 10 years later, the problem of medical errors remains and seems to have increased. A new study reported in the April, 2011 issue of Health Affairs, found that by one measure, medical errors occur in as many as one-third of hospital admissions in the U.S., and may be ten times greater than previously measured. “The most common are medication errors, followed by surgical errors, procedure errors, and nosocomial infections,” according to The Lancet’s review of the study.
• The study, conducted by scientists and professionals at three leading U.S. medical schools as well as at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, compared three different methods commonly used for measuring “adverse events” in hospitals: (i) voluntary reporting, (ii) the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Patient Safety Indicators (which rely on automated review of discharge codes to detect adverse events), and (iii) the Global Trigger Tool pioneered by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (based upon independent review of medical charts, with follow up investigation where indicated).
  
  The study found that this third method measured at least ten times more confirmed serious medical errors than did the other two methods. As observed by The Lancet’s editorial, “This finding suggests that the two currently used methods for detecting medical errors in the USA are unreliable, underestimate the real burden, and also risk misdirection of present efforts to improve patient safety.”
•  
• A study reported in the November 25, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, also confirmed that medical errors in U.S. hospitals are a serious problem. The study, conducted by lead author Christopher Landrigan, M.D., M.P.H. of the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, and a group of doctors from Harvard Medical School, Standford University School of Medicine, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, reported that even in places where local governments have made efforts to improve safety of inpatient care, such as in hospitals in North Carolina, the high rate of detected medical errors did not change over a 5-year period between 2002 and 2007.
• A November, 2010, document from the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services reported that one in seven Medicare beneficiaries have complications from medical errors when hospitalized, and that these medical errors contribute to about 180,000 deaths of patients per year.
• A study by Jill Van Den Bos and other professionals of Milliman’s Denver Health practice reported in the April, 2011 Issue of Health Affairs found that the measurable cost of US medical errors amounted to US $17.1 Billion in 2008 (0.72% of the $2.39 trillion spent on health care that year). Ten types of error accounted for more than two-thirds of the total cost of medical errors. The top two most costly medical errors are postoperative infections and pressure ulcers. The three most common medical errors were pressure ulcers, post-operative infections, and postlaminectomy syndrome.
• Another study, conducted by John Goodman and associates of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, TX and also reported in the April, 2011 Issue of Health Affairs, reported that medical errors cause as many as 187,000 deaths in hospitals each year, and 6.1 million injuries, both in and out of hospitals in the U.S. This study estimated that the social costs, in lives lost and disabilities caused, from these medical errors amounted to between $393 Billion to $958 Billion in 2006, equivalent to 18% to 45% of total US health-care spending in that year. These authors recommended as a possible solution that patients should be “offered voluntary, no-fault insurance prior to treatment or surgery [so that they] would be compensated if they suffered an adverse event—regardless of the cause of their misfortune—and providers would have economic incentives to reduce the number of such events.”

http://www.helpingyoucare.com/12784/alarming-trend-medical-errors-have-increased-in-the-u-s
http://www.helpingyoucare.com/12784/alarming-trend-medical-errors-have-increased-in-the-u-s