Healthcare negligence affecting hospitalized patients

A recent study, published on bmj.com, states that although lack of necessary hospital equipment and low staff numbers cause problems in the overall well-being of a hospital, insubstantial teaching, low monitoring of staff practices, and workers not following hospital regulations are far more detrimental to the health and treatment of patients in hospitals. The study claims that an estimated 1 patient per day in a hospital dies due to the negligence of hospital staff. The study claims these deaths could have, and should have been prevented. During their study, the researchers from the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation analyzed 25 hospitals spreading from Tunisa, Sudan, South African, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya and Morocco. They determined that although patients in hospital are obviously admitted because they are sick, many times, patients die because of poor health care, and not actually the health problem they were admitted for. The researchers explain that adverse events, an unplanned health problem which causes death or disability inflicted by inadequate care taking by health care professionals, were responsible for many deaths in patients, not the original disease or disorder that compromised their health to begin with. The goal of the study was to determine the cause of adverse events, how often they occur, and how they could be stopped. In 2007, around 5,500 volunteer patients from a range of departments were observed. The researchers determined that adverse events affected 8.2% of the patients. According to the authors, 83% of these events could have been avoided. 30% of these adverse events resulted in the patient dying. In addition, the longer the patient was in the hospital, and the older the patient was resulted in an increase in the number of adverse events that occurred. The data shows that most of the adverse events were a result of insufficient teaching and not enough supervision by other hospital workers. Also, it was seen that many of the health care professionals were not following the guidelines of the hospital. The authors explain that in at least one of the countries, where the hospitals were located for the study, adverse events were the 5th most common cause of death, following infectious disease, cancer, COPD and digestive disease. They state that more research is necessary to determine exactly what is causing poor health care. They also state that this is a serious problem - one that needs to change for the well-being and health of hospital patients.