New Report: Inspectors Need To Do Better Job of Tracking Hospital Errors
Is your hospital safe? Serious medical errors are going unreported, according to a new government report.

December 17, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, released a report in the fall of 2011 that reveals a disturbing trend. According to the HHS Office of the Inspector General, Medicare inspectors are coming up short in reporting and correcting serious medical mistakes.

Hospital Mistakes Unrecorded, Uncorrected

In 2010, the HHS Inspector General found that 15,000 Medicare patients died every month due at least in part to treatment they received in hospitals. The 2011 report focused on the worst of these errors, from surgical fires to operations performed on the wrong patients.

Of course, to address these types of errors, a victim or his or her family can turn to after-the-fact remedies available through the services of a New York Hospital Malpractice Attorney. But the report specifically highlighted that better recording measures and government oversight could have kept many mistakes from happening in the first place.

Medicare inspectors uncovered hundreds of serious errors at hospitals across the country in 2010. Yet, many mistakes went unrecorded, according to the HHS report, because Medicare inspectors often do not report them to national hospital accreditation agencies. Inspector General Daniel Levinson warns that this lack of communication allows hospitals with unsafe practices to continue to participate in Medicare without learning from their mistakes.

In addition, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services failed to follow up on corrective measures for many of the mistakes reported to them. State agencies operating under CMS direction only required one hospital to provide performance data out of the 19 cases that were determine to require corrective plans.

Improving Patient Care

The Health and Human Services report listed a number of steps to improve patient safety, including full CMS evaluation of compliance with hospital quality-assurance measures, better communication between CMS, state agencies and individual hospitals, and requiring accreditor notification when Medicare inspectors discover hospital mistakes.

The HHS report focused on serious errors like medical instruments left inside a patient after surgery, medication errors and failure to diagnose life-threatening conditions. When such mistakes go unreported, not only do hospitals have no incentive to make positive changes, they are not even aware of what to change.

There is something you can do to help make hospitals safer. If you or a loved one has been affected by a hospital error, do not let your ordeal fly under the radar. Contact a medical malpractice attorney today to ensure that proper corrective measures are taken and that you recover the compensation you deserve.

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