Seniors at Risk

Senior citizens are at risk if they have to spend time in a hospital. A new government study concludes that 15,000 Medicare patients die every month as a result of complications suffered during their hospital stay. Equally alarming, about 134,000 older people are harmed in hospitals each month. Surgical errors, hospital acquired infections and drug-related complications are just some of the adverse events that were tallied up in the report from the Inspector General at Health and Human Services. Almost half of the problems were considered avoidable. This is discouraging news since it suggests that relatively little progress has been made since the 1999 report on medical mistakes entitled To Err is Human.