According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, there were more than 455,000 cases of pressure sores among hospital patients in 2003. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2004, 159,000 nursing home residents in the United States suffered from pressure sores.
According to research from Johns Hopkins University, “never events”, or events that should never happen in surgery, occur at least 4,000 times annually in the United States. It also revealed that “never events” occurred more than 80,000 times between 1990 and 2010.
In the United States, there are currently over 123,000 people – men, women, and children – who are in need of organ transplants to save their life. Another name is added every 10 minutes to the national organ transplant waiting list. Unfortunately, an average of 21 people die every day due to delays in receiving the organ they need. In 2014, roughly 24,000 organ transplants are made possible by over 8,500 deceased donors and nearly 6,000 transplants from living donors.
New York patients should know that an estimated 7,000 people around the country die annually due to medication errors, and a total of about 1 million errors happen each year in U.S. hospitals. In one 2016 case, an 87-year-old woman was rushed to the emergency room due to a high fever, and her sister gave the ER doctor the woman’s medical history and a list of the medications she was on including some that had been recently added for cognitive issues.
New York patients may be interested to learn that a 60-year-old claimed in a lawsuit that a Connecticut hospital removed the wrong body part during a surgical procedure. She claimed that the doctors then attempted to cover up the mistake.
