The World Health Organization (WHO) has found that more than 138 million patients are treated with negligence every year by doctors. The announcement came on 16 September, just a day before celebrating the first World Patient Safety Day for raising awareness regarding medical negligence. There are many cases of negligence around the world and WHO has found three main reasons of medical negligence where patients faced errors in diagnosis, error in medicine prescriptions and the inappropriate use of drugs.
Dr. Neelam Dhingra-Kumar is the WHO partient-safety coordinator. She shared in a press conference that negligence in medical care are occurring due to healthcare systems that are incapable of handling these errors and learn from them. Many medical facilities hide what they have done wrong which keeps them away from learning from failure or repeated mistakes.
WHO has found out that medical negligence is more in the countries with a medium and low economic status where 80 percent of the global population lives. Even in developed countries, the number of medical errors is very high. In developed countries, one out of 10 patients is suffering from medical negligence and they are preferring for claiming compensation for medical negligence.
Applications of medication are being provided to the patients in the way that they are not designed for them, such as an error in blood transfusions and error in X-rays and the wrong side of the brain surgery. WHO has brought an initiative to curb the medical errors by celebrating every September 17 as World Patient Safety Day.