Instead of operating on a 39-year-old woman's cyst, they sterilized her. The reason - "confusion". Mixing up patients or body parts, prescribing the wrong medicines, objects left in the body carelessly after surgery - such serious mistakes by doctors according to the rules of the German Medical Service must never happen.
Nevertheless, last year, experts recorded about 150 such omissions, the Medical Service announced, presenting the statistics for last year. A total of 75 patients died due to medical staff errors. A year earlier, there were 84 deaths.
"To prevent such events, we need a reporting obligation," demanded the general director of the Association of Medical Services, Stefan Gronemajer.
However, since such an obligation does not currently exist in hospitals, the statistics only record cases reported by patients.
Now in Germany things work so that if you feel that there was a mistake in your treatment, you can contact the health insurance. The insurance then contacts the Medical Service to clarify the case. Only then does the case end in statistics.
In 2023, there were almost 12.500 applications, about 600 less than the previous year.
In the largest number of cases, 71,1 percent, medical experts did not prove that the doctors made a mistake. In approximately one in five cases, i.e. 2.679 treatments, they found that patients suffered harm due to a doctor's error.
This means that the absolute number of errors remains almost unchanged – in 2022 there were only 17 more. In all other reports, either there was no harm or a clear link between the health consequences and the medical error could not be proven.
In addition, the number of proven errors is well below one percent of all medical treatments in Germany. By comparison, according to the Federal Association of Physicians of Compulsory Health Insurance, there are more than 500 million cases of treatment per year in practice.
Experts calculate that in German hospitals every year there are around 17.000 deaths related to errors that could have been avoided, said Gronemajer, referring to a study by the Alliance for Patient Safety.
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