According to a recent research, 98.5 percent of the doctors confessed that they have committed some mistake during their practices. In this article we will discuss about medical errors done by doctors during operating a patient.
According to the research published in the recent issue of Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, 98.5 percent of the Resident doctors in a Lahore hospital said that they have committed some serious medical mistakes, of which 19% were of serious nature. 57% of the doctors reported the mistakes to their senior doctors, but only 11 percent of the patients were informed of the cases. This research was done at the Children’s Hospital and Institute of Child Health Lahore, and 130 doctors participated.
Dr. Atia Bari, speaking to the BBC, said that the research did not include the kinds of mistakes and their details. However, she said that based on the data of other countries, it can be estimated that there are serious consequences of medical mistakes in Pakistan.
A study published in the British Journal of Medicine last month estimated that after the death rate in heart disease and cancer, the third biggest cause of death in America is medical mistakes or medical errors and due to this, more than half a million people die every year.
Epidemic
Medical errors in the United States have been called a ‘epidemic’ and many organizations are working to reduce its rate. However, the situation in Pakistan is worse. According to Dr. Atia Bari, neither such records are recorded in Pakistan nor any such research has been done before on this subject. However, she said, they are intend to increase their scope of research and work further on this topic in the future.
Hazardous medical errors can be of many types. These include several types of elements from the doctor’s knowledge to the burden of work on him or her. In recent research, 65 percent of the doctors said that the major reason for their mistake was fatigue.
Beat the Dead
Another thing that works as ‘beat the dead’, is a medical stores’ staff, which increases the seriousness of the matter. Instead, they try to fix the prescription mistake of the doctor, they make further mistakes due to the lack of their training and education, resulting in the sufferings of the patient. A few days ago, a research was conducted in Karachi, which found that the use of abbreviations in the clinical prescriptions also causes mistakes.
This study, published in the Postgraduate Journal, concludes that the undergraduate doctors are even unable to understand those abbreviations as well. Remember that in 2014 a Peshawar study showed that no prescription written by doctors surprisingly meet the international standard requirements.