Educational Strategies to Prevent Medical Errors: A Description of the Literature

Most patients hold a reasonable expectation that they will be healed, not harmed, during the process of receiving health care. Patients place an enormous amount of trust in the medical professionals caring for them, and the medical community has an obligation to ensure the safest possible care for these patients. Unfortunately, preventable complications result in harm to millions of patients every year in the United States define medical errors as preventable events resulting from wrong plans of action or from failures of actions to be completed as intended. Medical errors may or may not result in adverse patient events. Examples of common medical errors include pressure ulcers, medication errors, and postoperative infections. A diagnostic errors is a missed or wrong diagnosis and is another type of medical error. Near misses are medical errors which do not yield patient injury. Overall, the resulting harm to patient from medical errors may range from unnoticeable effects to death. The scope of the crisis caused by medical errors is not acceptable, and it must be addressed by the medical community.