The Canadian Institute for Health Information has recently released a report indicating that approximately one in seventeen patients experience an injury due to nurse and/or physician error. We expect that this figure is a rough estimate, as there is no reliable system that captures all medical negligence. The Institute also indicated that, of those 6%, approximately a quarter were subject to more than one error.

Often these days, hospital staff and administrators atribute errors to understaffing and a too-high number of patients assigned to doctors and nurses. That can have an effect, but we find that errors are caused by carelessness, ignoring protocols, tunnel vision and a tendancy to ascibe serious symptoms to the most likely – and not serious – condition. For instance, these are just some of the errors we have seen:

• radiologists who missed obvious, significant signs on CT and MRI scans, and, in one case, actually seeing a structure he had never seen before and not seeking help, thereby missing a problem that caused severe injury and disbility  and hospitalization for over one year in a tertiary care hospital;
• nurses who were supposed to examine a patient every four hours deciding they should let the patient sleep instead, thereby missing the fact that the patient was slipping into a coma;
• nurses who ascribed pain and drowsiness to the effect of pain medication instead of the effect of a serious condition;
• doctors realizing the need for prompt surgery but simply failing to arrange it promptly;
• ascibing complaints of severe pain to a “pain control problem” or “drug seeking behaviour” from a patient with no history of drug abuse or an unusual reaction to pain;  and
• doctors prescribing drugs without knowing correct dosing and warnings about unsafe doses and contraindications.

These type of errors are not caused by lack of time.

The cost of hospital errors is enormous. We have had several clients hospitalized in tertiarry care hospitals for over a year, with a cost to the governmet of well over a milion dollars, and the continuing cost of care and medication thereafter. Unfortunately, there is no line item in hospitals’ or Ministry of Health bookeeping for “Cost of Medical Negligence,” so the financial cost is easy to ignore. Failure to take action to signiciantly reduce hospital errors  will affect all patients because limited hospital resources have to be directed to fixing the avoidable injuries caused to the patient, and the pain, suffering and disability of patients cannot be adequately addressed by money damages from a lawsuit.