Are American Hospitals Safe

Are you afraid of flying? Do you know anyone who is afraid of flying? Fearful or not, you have probably heard that flying is the safest form of vehicular transportation. In reality, the number of crash fatalities on U.S. airlines averages about 120 per year, far less than the 40,000 people who are killed by cars over the same period of time. That means you are about 333 times more likely to die in a car than on an airplane. But we hear more about airline accidents than car accidents on the news and in papers, giving most of us the impression that flying is pretty much a death-defying act. (Vogel 244)

Now can you imagine what we would be hearing from the press and outraged public if five airliners crashed in the U.S. each week? That would be 260 crashes each year, and we would all be seriously concerned and raising a revolt against the FAA and airline operators. Thankfully, this abominable situation is only fantasy; why, then, do I bring it up?

There is a parallel situation taking place in the United States that is causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people every year, but because the victims do not die together in a gruesome manner we don't all know about the problem. The place these deaths occur is in our hospitals, and the overall cause of the deaths is called medical error. About 37 million Americans visit one of the 5,747 registered hospitals each year, and somewhere between 120,000 and 195,000 patients will dies as a result of medical error while under treatment. A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association claims that number may actually be about 225,000 per year! Taking the smallest fatality number of 120,000 that toll averages 308 deaths per year per hospital. (Vogel 244)

That gruesome number doesn't count natural or untreatable deaths from the many diseases and injuries that put people under medical care. It does not count the 20,000 people who die from the flu each year. That number is the result of medical error. What is medical error? Most commonly, it occurs as a failure to fulfill one of the "Five Rs" of health care: right medicine, right dose, right route, right time, and right patient. We can easily see the result of a failure to provide the right treatment to the right patient in those cases where, for example, a college football player is supposed to be treated for a shoulder injury but wakes up to find a leg was amputated. (Goodman 524)

Let's start with the introduction of the Baltimore Sun article. “After a routine piece of medical equipment started mysteriously killing hospital patients a few years ago, the federal government turned to a small team of its software experts in suburban Maryland for help. The team's discovery — a flaw in a computer code that caused a drug pump to administer heavy overdoses — led to a recall, warnings and rewriting of the ...