The World Health Organization's (WHO) Patient Safety Conference in London has been told that hospitals in the Western world are worryingly unsafe. Delivering the keynote speech, British medical expert Liam Donaldson said that while people worried about dying on an airplane, which carried a 1-in-10 million chance of happening, they paid little regard to the astonishingly unfavorable odds of 1-in-300 of dying in hospital from a medical error.
Donaldson, who also heads the WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety, said that it was paradoxical that "people are more frightened of air travel than they are of healthcare."
Last year, statistics report that around 2,000 patients died in hospitals in Britain due to accidents and errors. Donaldson said that 50 percent of these fatalities - which involved misdiagnoses, delays in treatment and incorrect medications - could have been avoided if lessons from previous accidents had been learned.
Healthcare professionals needed to learn from other sectors on how to make safety a top priority, said Donaldson. "Other high-risk industries have systematically improved safety over a period of decades in a way that healthcare has not," he added.
Source: World Health Organization
