Preventable Harm

A definition:

The unintended physical injury resulting from or contributed to by medical care (including the absence of indicated medical treatment), that requires additional monitoring, treatment or hospitalisation, or that results in death.

A simpler definition:

A medical accident.

A few statistics:

The medical industry 2014:

• The estimated number of premature deaths in US hospitals caused by accidents: 400,000
• The number of hospital admissions in the US: 34,878,887

The commercial aviation industry 2014:

• The number of commercial flights in US airspace: 9,486,900
• The number of airline passengers in US airspace: 848,100,000

Some calculations:

If you assume the following 3 things:

• Every statistic you read on the internet is true.
• I am competent with a calculator.
• Commercial airline travel was as prone to accidental death as medicine.

Then:

• In absolute terms 12 planes would have crashed every day in 2014 killing every passenger on board.
• If, however, the death rate was the same (deaths / customer) that figure would have been 12 per hour.

Please feel free to check my maths.

A conclusion:

If aviation was as accident prone as medicine nobody would climb on board a passenger flight.

Fortunately the number of deaths in US airspace associated with accidents in 2014 was 0.

Why are hospitals so dangerous?

There are far more variables in medicine than aviation, so a comparison is a little less than fair.  However, according to Matthew Syed, it also has a lot to do with industry culture and the way staff react to mistakes.

In aviation people blame the system.  Errors are sought out and published anonymously so lessons are learnt.  In medicine people blame the profession.  Errors are a sign of failure.  Names are published and careers are ruined.

In aviation, they learn from their mistakes and in medicine they are scared of them.  So in hospitals medics repeat the same accidents over and over again.

What happens where you work?

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

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Image by Thomas Hawk