Interestingly this article offers a QUALY-based economic estimate, but for some weird reasons plucks a wild ass guess as to the average number of years of life lost as a result of medical errors—ten years, with not the slightest justification. Of course this leads to a largish estimate of total impact.
This other article updates the estimates of annual deaths in the US to 400,000 with a lower bound of 210,000. This may be the result of misapplying an estimate of what fraction of adverse events are preventable—this was estimated on the overall sample (including non-fatal adverse events) but then applied to the much smaller set of fatal adverse events. Most fatal events result from surgery, which the same article notes has a much lower rate of “preventable” events, but I can’t see that the total deaths estimate accounts for that.
Interestingly this article offers a QUALY-based economic estimate, but for some weird reasons plucks a wild ass guess as to the average number of years of life lost as a result of medical errors—ten years, with not the slightest justification. Of course this leads to a largish estimate of total impact.
This other article updates the estimates of annual deaths in the US to 400,000 with a lower bound of 210,000. This may be the result of misapplying an estimate of what fraction of adverse events are preventable—this was estimated on the overall sample (including non-fatal adverse events) but then applied to the much smaller set of fatal adverse events. Most fatal events result from surgery, which the same article notes has a much lower rate of “preventable” events, but I can’t see that the total deaths estimate accounts for that.