Rare, but serious: carelessness or wrong decisions in the operating room or treatment room often have tragic consequences. Patient advocates criticize the culture of error in medicine.
Instead of the planned operation for a cyst, a 39-year-old woman was sterilized – the reason: a mix-up. Mixing up patients or body parts, administering the wrong medication or inadvertently leaving objects in the body after operations – such serious errors by doctors are called “never events” by the medical service. According to experts, these are oversights that should never happen and could be avoided.
The experts registered around 150 errors of this serious nature last year. This was announced by the Medical Service when presenting its 2023 annual statistics in Berlin. It acts as an assessor for statutory health and nursing care insurance. A total of 75 patients died due to errors made by medical staff. In the previous year, the experts attributed 84 deaths to such errors.
“To prevent such events, we need a reporting requirement,” says Stefan Gronemeyer, CEO of the Federal Medical Service. Since this does not currently exist in hospitals, the statistics only record cases that are the result of patients’ initiatives.
Damage caused by errors proven in every fifth report
Because at the moment it works like this: If you feel that a mistake has been made in your own treatment, you can contact your statutory health insurance provider. They can then contact the medical service to have the case clarified. Only then does the case end up in the statistics. This happened almost 12,500 times in 2023, which is around 600 fewer reports than in the previous year.
In most cases (71.1 percent), the experts were unable to prove any misconduct on the part of the medical staff. In around one in five cases (21.5 percent), i.e. in 2,679 treatments, patients suffered harm due to a mistake made by the doctors. The absolute number of incidents thus remains almost unchanged – last year there were only 17 more. In all other reports, either no harm was found or no clear connection between harm and misconduct could be proven.
The number of proven errors is well under one percent of all treatments in Germany. For comparison: According to the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, there are well over 500 million treatment cases in practices each year. Nevertheless, the errors often have serious consequences for the patients.
How severe is the damage?
While the damage to patients is only temporary in most cases (65.5 percent), it is permanent in almost a third (29.7 percent) of those affected. Of the permanent damage caused by errors, the Medical Service classified 180 as serious last year. This means that patients are now in need of care, blind or paralyzed.
The number of unreported treatment errors is probably significantly higher overall. Experts suspect that avoidable damage occurs in one percent of all inpatient treatments. “Experts also assume that there are around 17,000 avoidable deaths in our hospitals every year due to errors,” explained CEO Gronemeyer. He cited a study commissioned by the Patient Safety Action Alliance, among other things.
In order to learn from these mistakes and prevent them from being repeated, the Medical Service believes that there needs to be an obligation to report such cases – without sanctions and pseudonymously.
Demands for hardship funds and reporting obligations
“When such errors occur, there are risks in the care process that must be systematically investigated,” said Gronemeyer. He criticized the fact that the hospital reform planned by the federal government does not contain any procedures for preventing errors. These have long been common practice abroad.
The German Foundation for Patient Protection also sharply criticized the way errors are handled in medicine. “Patients are being let down in this country. There is no culture of error in practices and nursing homes,” said the foundation’s board member, Eugen Brysch.
In response to a dpa query, the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) said that clinics and practices are already legally obliged to implement error reporting systems. “Evaluations in both the statutory health insurance sector and in hospitals show a high level of implementation of error management and error reporting systems,” the ministry said.
In order for those affected to be compensated, a hardship fund is needed, as promised in the coalition agreement. “It cannot be that the victims have to wait many years to get their rights,” criticized Brysch, and called on the Health Minister to draft a law. The BMG announced that it was examining whether a concept for the design of a hardship fund could be commissioned.
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
