ABSTRACT
A Problem That Is Not Going Away For all of the attention placed on patient safety and medical harm since 1999, a study released in 2010 suggested that “harm to patients was common and the number of incidents did not decrease over time,” contrary to the figures in the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) study that said medical mistakes cause as many as 98,000 deaths a year in the United States.1 In the more recent study, roughly 18% of patients were harmed, and more than 60% of those injuries were considered preventable. Data in a 2011 study in the journal Health Affairs showed that medical errors and adverse events occur in one of three admissions, and that errors may occur 10 times more frequently than the IOM study indicated.2
