Medical Mistakes

Changes to lower the number of medical mistakes According to Media Health Leaders medical mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Hospitals today are making life threatening mistakes and are looking for a way to fix their ways of error. Three methods that would help lower the number of medical mistakes are the increasing patients’ engagement, improving physician guidelines, while decreasing faculty shifts hours. Being aware of your condition and diagnosis would help decrease the chance of experiencing a medical error, because you would have more than just the doctor involved in your overall treatment. A study done by PubMed in “Unsaid but not forgotten: patients’ unvoiced desires in office visits”

According to the Associated Press in 2005 after the incident of anesthesia not working properly on patients undergoing surgery the American society of Anesthesiologists created guidelines for doctors to follow to make sure the anesthesia was given correctly and with this came the outcome of less medical mistakes dealing with the misuse of anesthesia. In “The effect of clinical guidelines on medical practice: a systematic review of rigorous evaluations” by PubMed and “Implementing clinical practice guidelines” by Effective Health Care it stated that the greatest benefit that could be achieved by guidelines is to improve health outcomes and reduce death rates. This proves that the use of guidelines clarified the doctor’s motives and gave patients the resolve they needed. The article “Developing information materials to present the findings of technology assessments to consumers: the experience of the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination” by Int J Tech Assess Health Care stated that guidelines also inform patients on their best options. Guidelines help develop a sense of security for patients and doctors while also benefiting the organization of the hospital

In fact a study done on “Intern sleep and patient safety” by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in 2004 showed an intern that worked a traditional shift (that was twenty-four to thirty hour shift) had a thirty-six percentage rate of more serious errors than an intern that worked an intervention schedule of sixteen hours or less. This study shows as a physician works more hours, they will do more medical mistakes by being gradually deprived of sleep. To prove this point Drew Dawson and Kathryn Reid’s “Fatigue, Alcohol, and Performance Impairment” study in 1997 showed that at the point of a performance level of one, a person is at sixteen hours of wakefulness and to compare that to a blood alcohol concentration ratio to one is 0.04%. This research shows that the effect on performance level of sleep deprivation in equivalent to a level of alcohol intoxication. Knowing the fact that a regular shift for a physician is around twenty-four hours and that at sixteen hours without sleep that someone could be compared to have been drinking alcohol is a surprising discovery. This study furthermore proves that shifts at a hospital should be sixteen hours or less, or have breaks in-between patients so doctors can avoid fatigue which leads to more