Preventable Medical Error

As a general acceptance, a medical error occurs when a health-care provider chose an inappropriate method of care or the health provider chose the right solution of care but carried it out incorrectly.

In practice the term "medical errors" is often preceded by the modifier "preventable." Medical world accepts that there are some medical errors for which preventability is rarely questioned. The list includes medical errors such as wrong site surgery administering the wrong medication when the correct one was ordered, or transplanting organs of the wrong blood type. On the other hand, there are and less preventable medical errors such as case studies reported in journals, where one or more experts review the treatment decisions of a clinician and conclude that the clinician's judgment was incorrect.

Most common causes for Medical Errors

The list of potential causes is not exclusive, but it does cover the main areas and most medical errors could be avoided if the doctors, nurses, dentists and other practitioners took more care.

An important conclusion of the above list is that the medical errors often result as a consequence of many factors.

Preventable medical errors

The federal government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that 18 categories of medical errors, such as postoperative infections, accidental reopening of surgical wounds, and medical objects left inside patients, result in 32,500 hospital deaths, cost $9.3 billion in additional hospital charges, and lead to over 2.4 million extra days spent in hospitals