How often do doctors kill patients?

[deleted647690]

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I was working in the hospital today, and I overheard a nurse asking a doctor if the amount of some kind of medication she was about to give a patient was correct, and the doctor laugh as she realized that the amount stated would result in death. I didn't realize it was so easy to kill someone in this field. How often do patient's actually die because of error? According to this article, it happens often, http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/201...ny-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-u-s-hospitals
Do these kinds of things normally just go under the radar? Like, doctors knowingly kill someone on accident and then just go about their business?

 

[AlteredScale]

I was working in the hospital today, and I overheard a nurse asking a doctor if the amount of some kind of medication she was about to give a patient was correct, and the doctor laugh as she realized that the amount stated would result in death. I didn't realize it was so easy to kill someone in this field. How often do patient's actually die because of error? According to this article, it happens often, http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/201...ny-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-u-s-hospitals
Do these kinds of things normally just go under the radar? Like, doctors knowingly kill someone on accident and then just go about their business?

Usually there's a weekly conference called Morbidity and Mortality which is usually where physicians discuss any "areas of improvements" where situations occurred that results in "avoidable" death or injury due to physician practice. So it def doesn't go unnoticed.

 

[Mad Jack]

Most of the time no one even realizes what has happened. It takes a lot of digging through records to find out if a mistake was made, as they're usually not very obvious. Given that over 98,000 people die from medical errors each year and many, many more are harmed, there's a good chance you'll seriously harm or kill someone at some point in your career. The worst part is, you might never even know so you could end up doing the same thing again.

 

[Beargryllz]

Something like 90-100k deaths/yr in the United States are due to medical errors. These can be from the doctors or other healthcare workers. It would be tough to determine exactly how many are specifically the fault of a physician because so many people are involved with healthcare.