My name is Janet Corrigan. I am the Director of the Institute of Medicine's Board on Health Care Services, which is responsible for IOM work in the areas of health care delivery, financing, benefits coverage, access and quality of care. These numbers reflect only patients who died in hospitals, and only deaths for which there was adequate documentation in the medical record to concur that the death was attributable to error. Medication errors are one of the most common types of errors. The Harvard Medical Practice Study, a study of more than 30,000 discharges from 51 hospitals in New York State, found that adverse events, manifest by prolonged hospitalization or disability at the time of discharge or both, occurred in 3.7 percent of hospitalizations, and about one-half of these adverse events were judged to have been preventable.
Medication errors occur frequently in hospitals.
These estimates of the incidence of medication errors are undoubtedly low because many errors go undocumented and unreported, and some errors go undetected in the absence of computerized surveillance systems. Not all, but many, if not most, of these adverse drug events are preventable. The potential for medication-related error increases as the average number of drugs administered increases. W know very little about errors that occur outside the hospital. I want to emphasize that errors are seldom due to carelessness or lack of trying hard enough on the part of health care professionals.