CHICAGO, Illinois -- More than 1,700 patients have died and 9,548 have been injured since 1995 due to poorly trained or overwhelmed nurses across the country, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The report in Sunday's editions of the Tribune places the blame on cuts in hospital staffs resulting in overworked registered nurses and the use of undertrained nurses.
An analysis of 3 million state and federal computer records showed that hospitals are sacrificing patient safety for a better bottom line, the newspaper said.
The records include cases of patients getting overdoses of medication, vital care being delayed for hours and nurses performing medical procedures without proper training.
The Tribune report, which focused on nursing mistakes, follows claims made in a wider-reaching 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine that estimated medical mistakes kill anywhere from 44,000 to 98,000 hospitalized Americans each year.
Errors rise as pressure increases
Errors have increased as working conditions have put more pressure on nurses.
"Certainly the pressure, because of health care costs, has been substantial," said Dr. John Eisenberg, director of the federal Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality. "What we need to do is look at the whole system and find out how we can prevent the natural errors that people are going to make from getting translated into injury to individual patients."
The Tribune's analysis found that many hospitals have increasingly turned to part-time nurses from temporary agencies. It also found that at least 119 patients had died under the care of unlicensed, unregulated nurse aides, who earn an average of $9 an hour.
Mandatory overtime and 16-hour shifts have led to a shortage of nurses willing to work at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, said registered nurse Kathy Cloninger, who has worked there for seven years.
"I wake up every day and hope I don't kill someone today," Cloninger told the Tribune. "Every day I pray: God protect me. Let me make it out of there with my patients alive."
Nursing staffs have been the first target for cutbacks at hospitals where profits have been squeezed by managed care programs and falling federal Medicaid reimbursements, said Rick Wade of the American Hospital Association.
Under a cost-saving program in at least two Chicago hospitals, housekeeping staff assigned to clean rooms were pressed into duty as aides to dispense medicine, the Tribune found.
Pleas for help went unnoticed
In testimony prepared for a national meeting scheduled Monday in Washington to discuss medical errors, the American Nurses Association said there is a critical need for research to explore the relationship of staffing levels and the number of medical errors.
One of the first hospital injury lawsuits to target corporate-level staffing decisions rather than individual negligence involved 61-year-old Shirley Keck, whose pleas for help went unnoticed as she lay gasping for breath at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita, Kansas.
Keck was one of 41 critically ill patients on her floor in February 1988 when she started having trouble breathing. Her daughter, Becky Hartman, ran to a nurses station several times for help but couldn't find help.
"There was nobody around," Hartman said. "I was raising my voice and getting angry. I was so frustrated."
The lawsuit alleged that lack of monitoring by nurses -- caused by short staffing -- led directly to the permanent brain damage Keck suffered. The hospital agreed to a $2.7 million out-of-court settlement, but maintains that it was safely staffed.
The Institute of Medicine report, issued in November, attributed many hospital deaths to basic flaws in the way hospitals, clinics and pharmacies operate. It was criticized by Indiana University scientists who said that the numbers were exaggerated and that the report failed to eliminate other risks or possible causes for the deaths.
After the 1999 report came out, President Clinton said hospitals should agree to routine reporting of serious and deadly mistakes.
CNN Medical Correspondent Rhonda Rowland and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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