Hospital Death Statistics Truly Shocking

An estimated 15,000 Medicare patients die each month from a lack of proper healthcare in hospitals. That’s not a typographical error, it’s actually 15, 000 per month. A release from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality called the news “alarming”. I would call it shocking and absolutely unacceptable. The study, the first of its kind aimed at calculating adverse events in hospitals, found that these deaths occur from a lack of basic patient care. The injuries resulting in the deaths include bed sores, infections and excessive bleeding from blood-thinning drugs. These medical errors are completely preventable.
According to the article published in USA Today, the results “tell us exactly what some of us have been afraid of, that we have not made much progress,” said Arthur Levin, director of the independent Center for Medical Consumers and a member of an Institute of Medicine committee that wrote a landmark 1999 report on medical errors. “What more do we have to do to make sure that sick people can rest assured that they’re not going to be harmed by the care they’re getting?”