Off topic – Half of surgeries had a medication error

Hospitals Mess Up Medications in Surgery—a Lot Bloomberg

• About half of all surgeries involve some kind of medication error or unintended drug side effects, if a new study done at one of America’s most prestigious academic medical centers is any indication.

• Anesthesiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital who observed 277 procedures there, is startlingly high compared with those in the few earlier studies.

• More than one-third of the observed errors led to some kind of harm to the patient.

• "In the operating room things happen very rapidly, and patients' conditions change quickly, so we don’t have time to go through that whole process,

• "Patients don’t need to go into surgery thinking that they’re going to have lasting permanent harm every second operation," Nanji said.

• In about one-fifth of the problems, adverse drug reactions were considered unavoidable—for example, . . .

  The PDF is behind a paywall, and you may have to subscribe to entire Journal

These are apparently just the ANESTHIA errors at a MAJOR institution.

Wonder how many SURGICAL errors at a NORMAL hospital?

Perhaps 80% of surgeries?

> 9,000 books on Medical Error on Amazon - some of which I have read and enjoyed.

• Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science Atul Gawande

• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right Atul Gawande