Hospitals Continue To Do Bad Things To Good People

An Editorial in USA Today is not apt to make you feel good about your next visit to the hospital.

Surgical screw-ups are a small part of a much larger patient-safety problem in hospitals.

Incidents such as bedsores, post-operative infections and failure to diagnose and treat conditions that develop in the hospital continued to plague American hospitals, according to a new study of Medicare patients by HealthGrades, a health care ratings company.

The study found that 1.24 million patient safety incidents occurred in nearly 40 million hospitalizations from 2002 to 2004. Those incidents were associated with 250,000 potentially preventable deaths and $9.3 billion of excess costs. For the second straight year, incidents increased slightly.