Poor hospital care harms millions globally – Research

A new research published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety has revealed that annually, 40 million people are harmed by poor hospital care globally.

This study provides early evidence that adverse events due to medical care represent a major source of morbidity and mortality globally.

The study dubbed: “The global burden of unsafe medical care: analytic modeling of observational studies,” made available to the Ghana News Agency shows that most of the unsafe medical care occurs in low- and moderate-income countries.

The objective of the study was to contextualize the degree of harm that comes from unsafe medical care compared with individual health conditions using the global burden of disease (GBD), a metric to determine how much suffering is caused by individual diseases.

Analytic modeling of observational studies investigating unsafe medical care in countries inpatient care settings, stratified by national income, to identify incidence of seven adverse events for GBD modeling.

Observational studies were generated through a comprehensive search of over 16,000 articles written in English after 1976, of which over 4,000 were appropriate for full text review.

The incidence, clinical outcomes, demographics and costs for each of the seven adverse events were collected from each publication when available.

The researchers used disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost as a standardized metric to measure morbidity and mortality due to specific adverse events.

The study estimated that there are 421 million hospitalizations in the world annually, and approximately 42.7 million adverse events and these adverse events result in 23 million DALYs loss per year.

“Approximately two-thirds of all adverse events, and the DALYs loss from them, occurred in low- income and middle-income countries,” it said.

Though suffering related to the lack of access to care in many countries remains, these findings suggest the importance of critically evaluating the quality and safety of the care provided once a person accesses health services.

It noted that while further refinements of the estimates are needed, these data should be a call to global health policymakers to make patient safety an international priority.

Source: GNA