To err is human

To err is human

Introduction

United State's health care facilities are not safe to the extent they should be. Preventable medical errors take the lives of at least 44000 people and at most 98000 people (Institute of Medicine, 1999). Medical errors arise due to the non compatibility of an action planned to the desire objective or use of an incorrect plan to accomplish an aim. ICU's, operating rooms and emergency units are most likely to suffer from serious consequences with high error rates. Nurses in critical care environments have to deal with high risk patients and extreme conditions placing themselves and other medications under immense pressure. Human errors cannot be eliminated but the systems in which practitioners work can be made a lot safer and freer from fault (Koezmara, 2006).

Discussion

Beyond their effect on human lives, preventable medical errors have cost an estimated $29 billion per year in hospitals nationwide (institute of medicine, 1999). The vast majority of the preventable errors have been caused by not the doctors but poorly designed processes that made doctors to make mistakes and at the same time failed to prevent them (Hultman, 2012). In most cases error do not kill people but rather prolong the treatment process at significant costs that actually reduces the trust of patients in the health care system. Hultman in his study in 2012 found that hospital patient face a greater than 25% chance of an adverse event and 13.5% of those actually experience adverse events during their stay in the hospital. He asserted that the rate is expected to increase based on the past evidences.

In another report published in 2000, Wakefield emphasized the importance of improvement in health care systems and maintained that more incidents are caused for medical errors than road accidents or AIDS. He urged for ...