DOTmed January 18, 2021
Sitting just behind heart disease and cancer, medical errors in hospitals were cited as the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2016, according to the BMJ, and the truth is not enough has been done to address the issue since. Considering how looked after we feel in a hospital setting, it’s a rather frightening statistic. It’s therefore important to remind ourselves that throughout history, from treating polio to discovering insulin, analytical inquiry has proven itself a crucial prerequisite to innovation and improvement. Sometimes, regardless of the veracity of such statistics, it takes a well-circulated critique to serve as a wake-up call for an industry to thoroughly re-evaluate itself.
Defining medical error has become more of a...