Hospital Blunders Double since 2006

Image via Wikipedia

The latest Nationa Patient Safety Agency report (NPSA) has indicated that the number of reported incidents and near misses has risen by 96%. Of the 86,085 medication incidents only 100 resulted in serious harm and of which 37 resulted in a patient death.

Now the papers would jump up and down and consider that this increase a grave cause of concern. I differ. Given the millions of people that access healthcare it is only natural that there will be some human error. This makes the percentage of risk lower than the 0.04% risk of death from an incident reflected above.

What most of these incidents will be what are referred to as near misses, i.e a mistake picked up and detected through normal process. The rise in figures? Quite simply I see this as better reporting and this is something to be celebrated. It reflects more honest and transparent working by healthcare staff. This allows for discussion,  focused individual and improved staff training programmes. Moreover, due to something referred to as clincial governance, each department will generally review each incident that occurs per month. From this any learning that needs to be taken to reduce future risk of recurrence is acted upon. My prediction is that we won't see continuous rises in these figures