By Jeanne-Vida Douglas
In 1996 Harriet Edna Marchant was admitted to Penrith Hospital, having been diagnosed with a blood clot in her arm. In an attempt to pinpoint the clot a dye was injected into her bloodstream through a drip inserted into her femoral vein in her upper thigh.
Due to a series of simple mistakes and oversights, the insertion point was not appropriately monitored and the blood clot bled into the surrounding tissue. Twenty-four hours later the bleeding had resulted in cardiac arrest—the wound had engulfed her upper thigh and was infected with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria.
Having entered the hospital a fit and alert 85-year-old, Marchant never fully recovered from what should have been a routine procedure.
Thankfully she was not to be counted among the 10,000 Australians estimated to loose their lives each year due to iatrogenic injury—she was wheeled out of the hospital she had walked into—but following the incident she found it challenging to recognise any of her seven adult children.
Latrogenic injury is the unintended or unnecessary harm or suffering arising from any aspect of healthcare management.
According to a study that was carried out by the Australian Patient Safety Foundation in 2001, iatrogenic injury causes 10,000 deaths and is responsible for around 10 percent of admissions to acute care wards.
The same report suggests that “medical misadventure consumes over half the amount spent on compensation and insurance by State Treasury Departments”, and costs the Federal Government in treatment about $2000 million annually.
In fact you are 40 times more likely to die as a result of iatrogenic injury in a hospital than you are to die from trauma from a motor accident.
While it’s not always clear-cut, roughly 20 percent of these deaths are thought to result from communications problems or poor record keeping, as opposed to other forms of misadventure.
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