Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health published stunning quality and safety data for hospitals around the globe in the British Journal of Medicine. In high income countries such as the United States, the rate of a serious adverse event from the care provided at the hospital is 14 percent, mostly affecting the elderly population. 78.6 percent of these adverse events resulted in death. This means that an elderly person admitted to a hospital for a medical problem has a 1 in 10 chance of being killed by the care. While I am sure some hospitals are far better than others, this data is appalling. It is slightly better odds than Russian roulette.

The most common adverse events in high income countries were adverse reactions to the drugs given and infections contracted while in the hospital. The researchers point out that the cause of decline is often the adverse event which enables another health condition such as heart disease to become untreatable. Hospitals will often list the cause of death as heart disease, when it was really the adverse event that caused mortality.

The researchers figured out that in high income countries (total population of 1 billion) these adverse events caused the inappropriate loss of 7,000,000 years of human life each year.