If the thought of visiting a hospital makes butterflies flutter in your stomach, you are neither alone nor is the fluttering without cause! Hospitals are accident prone zones, and often the news or memory of an adverse experience someone has had while in hospital might be the cause for your unconscious anxiety.
The World Health Organization estimates that an accident might be occuring in as many as1 in 300 patients admitted to hospital, ranking 10th among the causes of hospital deaths. It accounts for approximately 30,000 deaths in the USA alone. Compare this with 1 in a million (1,000,000) , the rate of accidents that occur in the airline industry, presently considered one of the safest.
Don’t get me wrong and start imagining that hospitals gobble up a large number of healthy lives of cheerful people going on a holiday. In most instances, these are critically sick people on the proverbial razor’s edge, who often tumble downhill after an intervention that retrospectively seems to have tilted the balance against them. Misadventure all the same!
What causes these accidents?
Human errors account for around 40% and can arise from simple errors like entering a patient’s blood group or allergies incorrectly in the file, to more complex errors like chosing and performing a wrong operation that proves overwhelming for the patient. Human errors are ubiquitous and occur in every organization that depends on human beings, but their imapct and consequences are never felt more than in the airlines and medical industries. The quality of recruits, their training, commitment, wellbeing (both professional and personal), monitoring and supervision are key factors.
It is not difficult to observe how quality can be compromised at several levels. The recent media exposes of “fraudulent” pilots, who did not qualify through merit and did not receive adeqaute training, yet made their way into the airlines industry, sent shivers down our spine. The concern it generated probably stems from imagining ourselves on board a flight 10 km up in the skies with the flight’s controls in the hands of an untrained pilot, flying us to a collective doom. Human medical errors may not cause “mass” deaths but “serial” misadventures, some of which may turn fatal. In hospitals, disaster often strikes when the paths of an ill-fated patient and a careless overworked doctor cross!
Technical errors are the 2nd most common. If you recount the last 10 airline accident news-reports, you will realize that most occurred due to technical snags with engines or “systems” letting them down; the recent Pawan Hans helicopter crashes are a case in point. Hospitals are no exception; despite measures that are locally feasible, malfunctions in hi-tec equipment do occur. Senior doctors point out that in the old days medicine was ineffective but safe whereas today's powerful treatments are effective but risky.
The 3rd cause is “Organizational Failure”. The airlines industry is much ahead in monitoring and tracking quality of performace of all categorie of its staff in an ongoing continuous mode, an area where hospitals are lagging far behind. The institutes of mangement and hospitals could work together and find solutions to some of these vexing problems.
As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 8 May, 2011.
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