He's been a pioneer on patient safety for many years and has conducted many of the basic studies on medical errors. I commend Dr. Leape and the I.O.M committee for their outstanding contribution in calling attention to the compelling need for national action to reduce medical mistakes and improve patient safety.
Medical errors are the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.
Reducing these errors can save lives and avoid countless family tragedies. The field of anesthesia undertook such an effort almost twenty years ago. The number of deaths from errors in administering anesthesia dropped from 60 deaths for every 300,000 patients in the early 1980s to just one death for 300,000 people today, a reduction of 98 percent. Our goal should be to achieve equal or even greater success in reducing other types of medical mistakes. According to the Institute of Medicine report, the vast majority of these mistakes are caused by flaws in the health system that encourage such errors, not by outright negligence of individual doctors or nurses.