2024-08-22 10:08:56
The fact that medical treatment is wrong or dangerous often becomes apparent only when patients call experts, such as those in the medical profession. And in a recent report, they found that the suspicion was confirmed in 25 percent of cases.
It is an annual tradition. The Medical Service, the body that keeps track of doctors when it comes to billing and quality of care, invites you to annual statistics. This time the result is: In 12,438 cases in 2023, experts were called because of wrongful conviction; more often than in 2022 with 12,400 reports. And in every fourth case, the patient’s suspicions were confirmed: it was a medical error, in total 3,160 cases.
In every fifth case, i.e. 2,679 treatments, an error is the cause of the injury suffered, the Medical Service is now saying, according to “annual statistics on treatment error statistics”.
Because these are proven treatment errors and not simply treatments that don’t work well, these are generally cases of avoidable damage. In 151 cases there were also “no events”, as they say in technical jargon: something happened that could have been avoided by prevention.
Among other things, cases have become known in which doctors mix patients or drugs together. Even the fact that medical equipment is forgotten in the stomach during operations – is also a classic in the history of medical errors. A particularly sad case: a 39-year-old woman who was supposed to have surgery for a cyst but accidentally underwent sterilization instead. After the fallopian tubes are ruptured, you are now sterile.
The majority, namely 40.5 percent, of the charges related to activities involving inpatient treatment at the hospital. 16.3 percent of the allegations against the actions of doctors or medical care centers, and 10.1 of complaints related to patient care without surgery.
Therefore, orthopedists and wound surgeons are often faced with medical malpractice diagnoses: this specialty accounts for 29.5 percent of complaints, followed by internal medicine and general medicine (11.5 percent) and dentistry (9.3 percent).
By far the most common treatments associated with malpractice are: installation of a hip joint prosthesis (104 treatment errors), tooth base treatment (96 treatment errors), knee joint replacements (84 treatment errors) , tooth replacement (70 treatment errors) , Bone fracture surgery (70 treatment errors), spine surgery (69 treatment errors).
Request for mandatory reporting
“In order to prevent such incidents, we need a reporting obligation,” asked Stefan Gronemeyer, Chairman of the Board of Directors. Medical service Federal. The reports will show only a small result. “We know from scientific studies that the number of unreported cases is much higher,” Gronemeyer said. “Experts estimate that avoidable errors and damage occur in about one percent of all patient care.”
If that’s true, if 168,000 patients are affected every year, then 17,000 people will die every year because something went wrong, Gronemeyer calculated. He believes that the reporting obligation will change something because hospitals and private practices can then learn from it which procedures are critical to errors and which safety precautions work well. However, this assumes that errors occur unexpectedly and not carelessly, for example because effective procedures are changed with a view to operating costs and thus become more dangerous for patients.
Answer from the hospital manager
The response from the medical staff was immediate; Because the medical profession will only hire experts “in completely exceptional cases”. “Many of them are colleagues who are tired of medicine, following the motto: Medicine is a very interesting subject – if not for the patients.”
The doctor of science is against the high rate of errors found among the examined treatments: “In 2022, 16.8 million patient treatments will be performed in German hospitals; 7.1 million patients underwent surgery. There will still be 729 hospital care cases in 2022. In contrast, there are 3,160 cases in which the medical service believes it has identified care errors.” These are far from proven; in such cases, a medical professional with “real expertise” will be authorized. “Only when they realize a mistake is a care mistake.”
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