Consequences of Diagnostic Errors on Patient Safety

According to previous studies, patient safety was not on the medical profession's priority list when it pertained to preventing medical errors; although no exact number was proven. In addition, reluctance to report mistakes and/or inaccuracies in medical record errors continued to increase (Allen, & Pierce, 2016). This was causing great concerns for the medical profession, primarily, due to areas where moral concerns and ethics were questionable; therefore, one might ask how massive the errors were. According to research from 2016 data verified diagnostic errors accounted for 17% of preventable errors for those patients hospitalized; approximately 9% of patients experience major undetected diagnostic errors while they were alive. In addition, per a Harvard Medical Practice study thousands of patients hospitalized died every year, because of diagnostic errors and physician- patient communication (Dass-Brailsford, deMendoza, Giller, Green, Power, Saunders. Schelbert, & Wisson, 2016; Patient Safety Network, 2016).