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Studies and reports claim that medical errors take between 250,000 and 440,000 people’s lives in the US every year. This makes hospital mistakes the third most common cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
Misdiagnosis in particular causes 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities in the US each year, which totals almost 800,000 people harmed by healthcare institutions due to incorrect diagnosis.
Bored Panda reached out to the trauma surgeon nicknamed trauma.bae on TikTok, who recently sparked the discussion about hospital mistakes online, and kindly agreed to chat with us about it more.
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She tells us that she was inspired to start the discussion with fellow medical workers online about medical errors because of a recent similar event that happened.
"It was initially meant to be a gossipy kind of TikTok to hear the crazy stories out there. The reason I thought of it was because the story of the surgeon in Florida who removed someone’s liver instead of their spleen just came out, so that was still fresh in my head.
As a surgeon, that’s actually the kind of stuff I talk about with my other surgeon friends and other healthcare workers because it’s so insane that you can’t not talk about it. I did not intend for it to be that deep, I was just using the “I’m bored” trend with a twist as a healthcare worker," she explained.
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She tells us that the reasons for such mistakes are generally complicated and can include a lot of factors.
"Most mistakes occur due to system issues, miscommunication, or human factors. Most errors are due to multiple mistakes as described in the Swiss cheese model rather than a single mistake."
Indeed, many experts are blaming medical errors on the way the healthcare system itself is operating. System failures, inadequate or unclear communication between healthcare professionals, and staff shortages are common causes of medical mistakes.
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Because of this, the trauma surgeon believes that workers who make mistakes shouldn't always suffer serious consequences.
"A punitive system does not reduce errors, it merely discourages errors from being reported out of fear and therefore has a worse effect on patient and staff safety.
Healthcare workers need to be aware of medical errors so we can learn from them and try to prevent them from happening again. [Those] who make mistakes are usually given the outcomes of the root cause analysis and offered training and education on the issue to prevent it from happening again."
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"The majority of errors are actual mistakes and not actions done with malicious intent," she adds.
"So think of a wrong medication being given because two drug names are similar, not a Dr. Death-type situation. Yes, criminal cases of medical harm exist, but thankfully, those aren’t common, and those are not the kind of medical mistakes that I’m talking about now. In the TikTok I made, I did not specify either way and was welcoming stories of all kinds, ranging from honest mistakes to criminal and malicious cases."
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After hearing such stories, some people may become apprehensive about trusting healthcare workers. We asked the trauma surgeon for her thoughts on this.
"First, I’d separate healthcare workers and healthcare institutions. The overwhelming majority of healthcare workers care very deeply about patients and are absolutely horrified about medical mistakes.
Second, healthcare institutions are businesses. While they have a mission to provide excellent patient care, the ability to do so requires more than just the workers.
In addition, the ability to run a good business and provide good patient care is highly variable among different facilities. Some institutions and systems function in ways that can lead to maximizing profits being a higher priority than patient care. I think it’s a well-known fact that the US healthcare system as a whole is broken and far from ideal," she explains.
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