According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 15,600 nursing homes in the United States. As the country’s population grows, as many as 40% of all adults will be admitted to a nursing home at some point in their lives.
Medication errors can occur because of negligence in a hospital, clinic, or pharmacy. However, there are also many cases in which patients suffer serious outcomes from medication errors that they have made on their own. It is important to be aware of these errors to avoid the chance of overdose or other serious complications.
According to a study published in the BMJ Quality & Safety journal, approximately 12 million adults seeking outpatient medical care are misdiagnosed each year in the United States. This amounts to 1 out of 20 adult patients and represents about 5% of outpatient encounters. From the statistics that researchers have produced, in 50% of those cases, there is a potential for serious harm as a result of the misdiagnosis.
New York patients struggling to receive a correct diagnosis may face problems. Some illnesses are misdiagnosed at a much higher rate than others, such as celiac disease, Lyme disease and endometriosis. These three conditions require an elimination of symptoms, which means that patients are often inappropriately diagnosed multiple times before the correct diagnosis is arrived at.
Every day, thousands of heart surgeries are performed in the United States. In fact, 500,000 coronary bypass procedures were performed in one recent year. Although there is a shortage of donor organs, heart transplants are performed on more than 2,300 people each year.
