The principal goal of health care providers is provide the best quality of care they can to their patients in all areas and services, especially these with high risk which include emergency rooms. Most emergency rooms are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for that reason a large amount of people use an emergency department to resolve their medical problems including primary care, minors and complicate medical problems, car and other accidents, etc. "The annual number of emergency department visits were more than 119 million in 2006, that's 326,027 visits per day" (PHR Service-PHR Research & Statistics.) Emergency room's medical personnel and staff works under stress and this lead to medical errors including misdiagnosis, surgical mistakes, prescription and anesthesia errors, infections, and other daily emergency activities. Some actions that risks managers take to prevent medical errors in emergency rooms include identify potential areas of exposure and areas requiring performance improvement, create and implement improvement plans using references, tools, and resources, measure organizational improvement over time through internal and external reports and apply the different and appropriates safety regulations providing by OSHA and EMTALA procedures.
Cover of the first issue of Journal of the America...
Medicare
Medicare"According to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), over 225,000 people die each year due to medical malpractice and nearly half of these are from emergency room errors. Medical malpractice has become the third leading cause of death in the United States, after deaths from heart disease and cancer. The JAMA article also broke down the following medical malpractice statistics: 12,000 deaths/year from unnecessary surgery, 7,000 deaths/year from medication errors in hospitals, 20,000 deaths/year from other errors in hospitals, 80,000deaths/year from infections in hospitals, and 106,000 deaths/year from non-error, adverse effects of medication" (Medical Malpractice Facts & Statistics on Hospital Mistakes, Cost). Some common emergency room errors...