Sheba Masih
Assignment #2: Medical Errors
HMGT 420 Health Care Facilities Management
Professor: Jerome Bozek
Due: April 9
th
, 2017
1
HGMT420 Quality Topic Research Summary
Student Name
Sheba Masih
Quality Topic
Medical Errors
Quality Topic Description
Medical error is a serious problem in healthcare today. It poses a threat to patient
safety. The most recognized way
to reduce medical errors is to understand the
aspects that lead up to the error and determine ways to protect the patients in the
process. According to Ethan Grober and John Bohnen, “Medical errors are a
leading cause of death in North America; between 44 000 and 98 000 patients are
estimated to die each year in the USA as a result of medical errors. Using
conservative estimates, deaths due to medical errors exceed the number
attributable to the 8th leading cause of death in North America” (2005).
Besides the alarming rates in death due to medical errors, the costs of
these errors pose an issue as well. Medical errors are estimated to cost between
US$17-billion and US$29-billion per year in lost income, lost household
production, disability and additional health care costs (Grober, Bohnen, 2005). The
only way for healthcare providers to reduce these errors and the costs of these
medical errors is to determine the cause and come up with solutions or
improvement methods to decrease the amount of medical errors. Too often, when
providers make an error during a procedure, they fail to report this incident or
inform the patient about what went wrong during the procedure. This is because
many providers believe that reporting a critical incident can result in them losing
the health practice and may bring legal problems for them.
