The Risk of Death from Hospital Surgeries

A near unbelievable report was published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine¹.  It showed that in 2006 48,000 Americans who went to a hospital for surgery were killed by infections acquired while at the hospital.  This included many people who were generally healthy and having routine surgery.  The cost to the health care system for this medical ineptitude was 8 billion dollars.

The study looked at 69 million discharge records between 1998 and 2006.  It identified patients with sepsis (blood infection) or pneumonia following surgery.  20% of the people who became infected died. 

The cause of this problem is two-fold:
1) Poor germ control in hospitals.
2) The rampant overuse of antibiotics for decades that has caused the breeding of deadly super-strain infections.

As I reported back in October of 2009 74,000 Americans are killed each year due to poor quality care in hospitals (a study comparing the best hospitals to the not so good hospitals).

And we have known since the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine² that up to 98,000 people a year are killed by medical mistakes – i.e., stupid incompetence. 

These various reports indicate an extreme problem in the quality of care in America health care – something not even touched on in the current health care reform debate.  How can costs be controlled when care is rampantly incompetent?  While it is next to impossible to accurately determine what the cost is, the FDA estimates it to be 20 – 75 billion per year.