Encouraging News on Safety in Health Care

When you are sick, you would want to believe that the clinicians and facilities that care for you are going to help you get better.  Unfortunately, hospitals in particular are often places where people get new illnesses or have other adverse events, as we have seen during the CV-19 epidemic.  People get infections, often drug-resistant ones, they fall, they are given the wrong drugs and so on.  So there has been a concerted effort for decades to improve safety, again, especially in hospitals.  According to a new study, those efforts are working.  The researchers found that in the last decade, the rates of adverse events occurring in a hospital for major categories of treatment–heart attacks, major surgery, heart failure, pneumonia–declined very significantly, by over 40% in most cases.  These declines were seen notwithstanding the average patient being in worse health when admitted, as a result of efforts to reduce overall hospitalizations.  Not only does this progress on safety represent better quality outcomes for patients, it lowers overall health spending.    (JAMA Study)