A major investigation of the U.S. military hospital system, which is completely separate from the scandal-plagued Veterans Administration system, has revealed to be rife with chronic yet avoidable errors, and is only subject to sporadic scrutiny, the New York Times reported on Saturday. The review was based on Pentagon studies, court records, analyses of thousands of pages of data, and interviews with current and former military health officials and workers.
The military hospital network, which cares for the 1.6 million active-duty service members and their families, was discovered to have a particularly bad track record in the areas of maternity care and surgery. "More than 50,000 babies are born at military hospitals each year, and they are twice as likely to be injured during delivery as newborns nationwide, the most recent statistics show," the paper said.
It said its examination concluded that "the military lags behind many civilian hospital systems in protecting patients from harm." "The most common errors are strikingly prosaic - the unread file, the unheeded distress call, the doctor on one floor not talking to the doctor on another," the paper said.
But it also quoted examples of "never events," so-called because they are grave yet preventable at the same time. "A viable fetus died after a surgeon operated on the wrong part of the mother' body," the paper reported. "A 41-year-old woman's healthy thyroid gland was removed because someone else's biopsy result had been recorded on her chart. A 54-year-old retired officer suffered acute kidney failure and permanent hearing loss after an incorrect dose of chemotherapy," it cited as other examples.
However, defense officials were quoted to claim that military hospitals deliver treatment that is better than civilian hospitals, according to Reuters. "We strive to be a perfect system, but we are not a perfect system, and we know it," the paper quoted Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, as saying. "We must learn from our mistakes and take corrective actions to prevent them from reoccurring."
A 90-day review of all military hospitals was ordered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in late May to determine whether all military hospitals were suffering from the same problems recently exposed in the veterans health system.
