The Risk of Being Hospitalized

Note: This study is not summarized from peer-reviewed journal papers. Consequently, the numbers presented here may debatable. However, the topic and the general conclusions are too important to be ignored while waiting for more accurate details!

We believe that the sources we quote are reliable enough to be taken seriously.

A recent bulletin of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) states that "Every year at least 98,000 Americans die - and millions more are injured - as a result of medical errors". This is a serious cause for alarm! If true, this number (of deaths) is about equal to the annual number of deaths from all accidents (based on "National Vital Statistics Reports" for 2002), and higher than the annual number of deaths from diabetes, influenza, Alzheimer's and other less prominent diseases.

This number originates from a 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine that is a chartered component of the U.S. National Academies - certainly a highly prestigious, respected and trustworthy source. A 2004 study by the Lakewood, Colorado-based HealthGrades Inc. put the number at 195,000 after adding in the number of patients who die as a result of infections in hospitals. In addition, they state that "that there is little evidence that patient safety has improved in the last five years". The number of patients dying from infections is taken from a web page of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that states that "Each year nearly 2 million patients in the United States get an infection in a hospital. Of those patients, about 90,000 die as a result of their infection." Books, such as Wall of Silence and Internal Bleeding have been written about these issues.

Given these issues, what are one's options? Certainly one can tilt at windmills - create action committees, lobby politicians, sue hospitals, etc. However, if one is in need of hospitalization, these activities won't provide the needed relief. The AARP website lists various actions you can take to mitigate the risks we have mentioned:

This topic has now received the media attention it deserves courtesy of Oprah Winfrey.

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Last Modification - November 12, 2004