
News | January 3, 2025
According to a study recently published in BMJ Quality & Safety, an online journal that provides information relating to healthcare quality, 43 million instances of medical negligence occur worldwide every single year.
Researchers were able to break down the millions of instances by category and pinpoint where they are happening most frequently around the globe.
Individuals from the Harvard School of Public Health conducted the study and deduced their conclusions after examining 4,000 articles on patients all over the world who received substandard care. The articles were written during a 35 year timeframe starting in 1976.
Researchers separated the instances into seven distinct medical error classifications including:
They were able to determine the number of instances each occurred in various areas of the world: low, middle, and high income countries. Roughly 17 million cases of medical errors occurred in high-income countries. Nearly 26 million errors occurred in low and middle-income countries.
The results also showed that low and middle income countries have twice as many deaths (15 million compared to 7) from overall medical errors as high-income countries-possibly due to inadequate, care, equipment, and sanitation in developing countries.
Dr. Ashish Jha, one of the Harvard School of Public Health researchers, suggests that patients, regardless of location, shouldn’t face additional harm from unnecessary medical errors and that it “should be a major policy emphasis for all nations” to provide proper patient care.
Chief Patient Safety Officer with a physician-owned medical malpractice insurer agrees and says that “outgrowth of this research for all countries, not just the United States is needed.” He hopes that more standardized data collection systems will be implemented to aid in this.
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