The serious problem of medical errors is not new, but in the past, the problem has not gotten the attention it deserved. The final report of the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry , released in 1998, identified medical errors as one of the four major challenges facing the Nation in improving health care quality. While there has been no unified effort to address the problem of medical errors and patient safety, awareness of the issue has been growing. Americans have a very real fear of medical errors. Thirty-two percent of the respondents indicated that the error had a permanent negative effect on the patient's health.
Most people believe that medical errors are the result of the failures of individual providers.
This fear of medical errors was borne out by the interest and attention that the IOM report generated. The IOM emphasized that most of the medical errors are systems related and not attributable to individual negligence or misconduct. The key to reducing medical errors is to focus on improving the systems of delivering care and not to blame individuals. Health care professionals are simply human and, like everyone else, they make mistakes. The specialty of anesthesia has reduced its error rate by nearly sevenfold, from 25 to 50 per million to 5.4 per million, by using standardized guidelines and protocols, standardizing equipment, etc.