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0 pointsBrazzVuvuzela4y ago0 comments

> Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.

> The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death certificates.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

I don't know if this is credible or not, but it's coming from the John Hopkins School of Medicine which I think is broadly credible.

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aix14y ago

Thanks for sharing. Here is another paper on the subject (cited in the Johns Hopkins study you linked to):

https://journals.lww.com/journalpatientsafety/Fulltext/2013/...

> Using a weighted average of the 4 studies, a lower limit of 210,000 deaths per year was associated with preventable harm in hospitals. Given limitations in the search capability of the Global Trigger Tool and the incompleteness of medical records on which the Tool depends, the true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year. Serious harm seems to be 10- to 20-fold more common than lethal harm.

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