Medical Errors And Patient Safety - Essay Example

The expansion of medical errors worldwide has been significant; in fact, it could be stated that the specific problem occurs in most people – or at least, everyone knows someone who has suffered a severe health problem because of a medical error – either directly or indirectly, i.e. within his own family or among his friends/ colleagues. The specific phenomenon reveals the following fact: medical errors cannot actually be controlled – being depended on events that cannot be foreseen; even highly experienced medical practitioners may fall into medical error.

Another result of the expansion of medical errors is the limitation of trust to the providers of medical services – in many cases, the guidance of medical practitioners or appropriately qualified medical staff (referring to the prescribing by nurses) is not followed by patients – being afraid of a potential medical error. From this point of view, the medical errors affect the patient-medical practitioner relationship.Medical errors can have two different forms/ aspects: they can refer to the misdiagnosis on a specific illness or they can have the form of oversight.

Both these aspects of medical errors can be dangerous; misdiagnosis can lead to the development of inappropriate treatment or even to no treatment – if the diagnosis is negative – wrongly - regarding the existence of a disease; oversight can lead to a series of failures in the provision of medical treatment; oversight can take place at various phases of a treatment – oversight can also lead to misdiagnosis – when facts that are of critical importance for the identification of a disease are not taken into consideration either for establishing the treatment or for suggesting the type of appropriate for a particular disease.