US Doctors Kill More People Than Guns Do

Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, is a professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Although he works right in the heart of mainstream academic and clinical medicine, Dr. Pronovost is taking an unusual and even heroic step and speaking out about medical errors. Tens of thousands of people are dying unnecessarily, he says, and one main reason involves the enormous arrogance of many doctors.

In his commentary, published in the July 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. Pronovost, who is a patient safety expert, argues no measurable, achievable and routine strategies to prevent patient harm even exist in the health care industry. In fact, he states there are too many barriers in the way to attain workable ways to protect patients — and at the top of the list is the arrogance of doctors “who are overconfident about the quality of care they provide or always believe things will go right and aren’t prepared when they don’t, and of hospital officials who fail to aggressively address problems like hospital-acquired infections.”

In his JAMA paper, Dr. Pronovost points out that each year about 100,000 people die from health care-associated infections, another 44,000 to 98,000 die of other preventable mistakes and tens of thousands more die from diagnostic errors or failure to receive recommended therapies. Unfortunately, there is limited evidence these patient outcomes are improving, either. “It’s unconscionable that so many people are dying because of these arrogance barriers,” Dr. Pronovost said in a statement to the media. “You can’t have arrogance in a model for accountability.”

There is one area where patient safety is improving — in the area of central line-associated bloodstream infections — at least, in a few hospitals. Although these deadly infections remain common, enormously expensive and kill over 30,000 Americans a year, they are now known to be largely preventable due to Dr. Pronovost’s own research and innovations. He introduced a simple checklist into hospital intensive care units (ICUs) at Johns Hopkins and then the entire state of Michigan. Wherever the checklist was consistently used, these life-threatening infections were reduced to almost zero.