Health Impact News Editor Comments: I am not sure why WHO linked hospital deaths to flying, which is one of the safest forms of travel. They should have mentioned that there is three times more risk of being killed in a hospital than there is in driving your car, as auto deaths in the US are around 30,000, while hospital deaths are over 100,000.
Excerpts:
Millions of people die each year from medical errors and infections linked to health care and going into hospital is far riskier than flying, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
“If you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any country… your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like 1 in 10. Your chances of dying due to an error in health care would be 1 in 300,” Liam Donaldson, the WHO’s newly appointed envoy for patient safety, told a news briefing.
Of every 100 hospitalized patients at any given time, 7 in developed and 10 in developing countries will acquire at least one health care-associated infection, according to the United Nations agency.
“The longer patients stay in an ICU (intensive care unit), the more at risk they become of acquiring an infection,” it said. Medical devices such as urinary catheters and ventilators are associated with high infection rates.
Each year in the United States, 1.7 million infections are acquired in hospital, leading to 100,000 deaths, a far higher rate than in Europe where 4.5 million infections cause 37,000 deaths, according to WHO.
Read the Full Article Here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/21/us-safety-idUSTRE76K45R20110721