Medical Errors In The Healthcare System

Unfortunately, medical errors are one of the parts of the healthcare system. In general, medical error is defined as an action which leads to harm to a patient. On the other hand, medical errors can also be classified as errors of medical specialists or like drawbacks in healthcare system which can make patient diagnose and treatment more complicated. Despite the fact that definition of medical error is not determined properly, their classes, clauses and ways of prevention and correction are studied quite well. Analysis of reasons, types and consequences of medical errors is the main purpose of this work.

Causes of medical errors

There is a diversity of medical errors possible and they can be classified by its cause, harm caused etc. In general,

There is a variety of factors which can make prevention of medical errors more effective and improve patient’s safety. The most widespread method of collecting information about medical errors occurred is extracting information from reports of diffrernt physicians and building a statistics on this base. However, measures of providing of patient’s safety include many other statements.

Firstly, patient’s safety is provided by informed consent of a patient. Though, there is a misconception of interpreting of medical errors in context of this consent (Hallock et al., 2017). Of course, an error can occur in case of any consent which does not guarantee total safety, because the majority of medical procedures include a kind of risk. However, if some negative effect on patient’s health occurred arbitrarily and was not provoked by wrong treatment or misdiagnose, it would not be considered a medical

On the first glance, it does not relate to question of medical errors directly, but level of physician qualification can be measures by number of patients treated and number of medical errors made during the treatment (Plews-Ogan et al., 2016). Taking into attention this statement, statistics mentioned above can draw a general state and level of qualification of physicians in particular area. Every physician needs qualification development from time to time and this statistics helps to determine the most problematic questions in patient’s safety and medical errors prevention politics.

Furthermore, the third important factor of prevention of medical errors is methods used for its analysis and generalization. Rationalization and roots cause analysis are recommended methods for this purpose, according to Charles et al. (2017). So, rationalization helps understand the main cause of the problem and causes of its appearance and thus solution of this problem becomes more effective. Except from that, roots cause analysis is useful for a few causes with the same medical errors occurred. This method of analysis extracts the main cause of errors and it is easier to prevent and avoid them