Patient Safety: Almost A Quarter Experience Harm During Hospital Stay, Study Finds

How many patients experience harm during their stay at a hospital? Nearly a quarter of them do, researchers have found.

For their work, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of researchers sought to shed light on the adverse events that patients experience while they're hospitalized.

"Adverse events during hospitalization are a major cause of patient harm, as documented in the 1991 Harvard Medical Practice Study," they wrote. "Patient safety has changed substantially in the decades since that study was conducted, and a more current assessment of harm during hospitalization is warranted."

The researchers looked at data on patient harm in 11 Massachusetts hospitals in 2018. They found that there was "at least one adverse event" in 23.6% of the 2,809 admissions that they looked at. That's about 663 of the patients.

Out of 978 such adverse events, 22.7% were deemed to have been preventable, though most were unpreventable. Some 32.3% were considered to be "serious" or even higher.

Drug events or medications were said to be the most common ones, followed by surgical or other procedures, then "patient-care events" such as falls. Next were infections, which accounted for 11.9% of the adverse events.

There were seven reported deaths. One of them was said to be preventable.

"These numbers are disappointing, but not shocking," the study's lead author, Dr. David Bates of Brigham and Women's Hospital, said, as per NBC News. "They do show we still have lots of work to do."

Indeed, this is not the first report that highlighted the incidence of such patient harms in hospitals. In 2022, for instance, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report showing rather similar results.

In it, they found that "one in four" or 25% of Medicare patients experienced harm during their hospital stay, this time from October 2018. Some 43% of them were said to have been preventable.

If there's hope in the new report, however, it's the fact that infections accounted for about 12%, which is said to be an improvement compared to the original 1991 report where they were the second most common harm, NBC News reported.

Still, these recent reports highlight the need for better patient safety. As the OIG noted in 2022, "substantial efforts are still needed" even with the many current efforts to reduce patient harm in hospitals.

"These findings underscore the importance of patient safety and the need for continuing improvement," the researchers of the current study wrote.