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Children with chronic conditions more commonly affected by medical errors
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Prolonged hospital stays and more complicated conditions make children with chronic conditions more likely to be affected by medical errors than children who do not have chronic conditions, according to results of a recently published study.
Using the 2006 Kids’ Inpatient Database that included data from 38 states, Huiyun Xiang, MD, MPH, PhD, of the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and colleagues looked at hospital discharge data and focused on certain codes that would have indicated a medical error had occurred during the child’s stay. Commonly hospital-reported errors were related to infections after surgery. A small number of reported errors were medication adverse effects.
According to the study, it is estimated that more than 1 million medical errors in hospitalized children aged 0 to 18 years were reported by hospitals in 2006. Two-thirds of these medical errors occurred in children with chronic conditions. Xiang and colleagues reported that among hospitalized children who had chronic health problems, 5% reportedly had been affected by a medical error. Among those children with no chronic health problems, 1.3% were affected.
In recent years, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has been funding projects that hone in on preventing medical errors, after the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System.” In that report, the IOM provided the now famous estimate that medical errors caused “44,000 to 98,000 deaths a year.”
The IOM compared its estimate with other estimated death tolls from 1999. Using the low-end estimate of 44,000 deaths a year, medical errors were still responsible for more deaths than motor vehicles, breast cancer and AIDS.
“The take-home message for pediatricians who treat children with long-term chronic conditions is we need to be aware of these risks and be proactive in preventing these medical errors,” Xiang, associate professor of pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, told Infectious Disease News.
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