Medical Errors In Health Care Essay

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999 released a report called To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, describing how medication errors were the leading cause of death and disabilities in the United States with 44,000 – 98,000 people die each year. A recent analysis published in 2016 cited that medication error death are likely the third most common cause of death in the United States. Errors are defined as “the failure to complete a planned action as intended or the use of wrong to achieve an aim.” Errors can be contributed to delays in diagnosis or treatment, communication or equipment failures, failures in diagnosis, treatment, or surgical procedures, selection or doses of medication (Young & Kroth, 2018). Errors occur in every health care setting, not only hospitals; clinics, physicians’ offices, pharmacies, homes, and nursing homes. Americans expect to receive high quality of care to maintain or restore their health or well-being, but that is not always the case (Nickitas, Middaugh, & Aries, 2016).

Two options can take place to solve the problem of medical errors. Understanding that health care in the United States is a decade or more behind many other high-risk

Targets would include developing a research agenda, defining safety systems, developing, disseminating, and evaluating tools to identify and analyze errors, educate the public about patient safety, and recommend additional improvements as they present. The Patient Safety office should be located in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which is already involved in various quality and safety issues and has experience in funding research, education, and coordination of services (Schulman & Kim,