A physician recently took time out of his day to pen a thread on X, urging families to "never leave your loved one alone in the hospital."
His list of reasons had little to do with comforting the sick person and everything to do with double-checking medications and other essentials for the overworked staff.
Human error in hospitals causes thousands of deaths each year, though the biggest reported numbers have come into question.
"Watch over everything like a hawk"
Regardless of statistics, Dr. Suneel Dhand, MD, seems to be coming from a place of experience. In a Monday thread on X, he provided steps people can take to limit harm from common hospital errors.
"Never leave your loved one alone in the hospital," he began. "Every hour you are allowed to be there, if you are able to, I highly recommend being there."
"Be perfectly cordial with staff. But watch over everything like a hawk."
In particular, he recommends triple-checking the medications list, especially if there are home medications listed from a computer. Once home, he urges caretakers and loved ones to call the same nurse and check again.
"A lot of 'fake news' in electronic medical records," he said.
The next step is all about avoiding "muscular deconditioning," also known as "deconditioning syndrome."
This happens when a patient fails to move around or perform necessary exercises following an injury or surgery. A lack of movement can hamper their recovery and, at a certain age, end their physical independence.
"Muscular deconditioning, especially over the age of 65, sets in EXTREMELY quickly—and can lead to complete loss of independence in a previously functional person," Dhand wrote. "I have seen this happen many times, and it is terrible."
Patients should be up and moving multiple times by day two or three, according to the doctor. Unfortunately, many hospitals aren't staffed for that.
"This is super duper true," weighed in Dr. Syed Haider on X.
How many people die due to hospital errors?
In a popular response to Dr. Dhand's thread, finance guy Aakash Gupta suggested that chronic hospital staffing issues cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.
"Hospitals kill between 250,000 and 400,000 Americans per year through preventable medical errors," he claimed. "That makes 'your doctor’s mistake' the third leading cause of death in the United States, behind only cancer and heart disease."
Numbers like these have hit headlines throughout the years, but determining what counts as a death via error can be tricky.
In 2023, the Association of Health Care Journalists penned a report highlighting the studies that produced the "250,000" and "400,000" numbers.
"Missing in the coverage was scrutiny of the researchers’ flawed methods, which involved extrapolating death rates from unrepresentative patient populations and making unsubstantiated causal connections between errors and deaths," they explained.
The report highlighted a 2020 Yale University meta-analysis found that hospital error could account for only 22,000 annual deaths.
Of course, one death means everything to those the deceased left behind, so still keep an eye on your hospitalized loved ones—and also care about the real issues of U.S. hospital priorities and staffing issues.
"Hospitals don’t optimize for your family member’s recovery," Gupta correctly points out, at least when it comes to the U.S. "They optimize for throughput."
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