The city Health Department is grossly underreporting the number of deaths from preventable medical complications and accidents at hospitals and nursing homes — fuzzy math that could turn a stay in a city hospital into a death sentence, a startling new study reveals.
In its report covering a five-year period ending in December 2010, the DOH’s Bureau of Vital Statistics reported only 188 deaths from complications caused by medical and surgical care.
But for that same period, the city Medical Examiner’s Office certified 2,471 deaths as “therapeutic complications” and 312 as “medical accidents.”
“If these complications and medical accidents were considered as a ‘disease,’ they would rank as the 10th leading cause of death in New York City, surpassing homicides and suicides in some years,” according to the study conducted by researchers from the ME’s Office and NYU School of Medicine and recently published in the journal Public Health.
The DOH data is critical because it’s the primary basis for action by the city in responding to hospital-safety issues.
“If there is no sense of a pressing problem, there is no urgency to solve it,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Med School, who was not involved with the study but reviewed it for The Post.
“It’s a call to action to think outside the box — to really take seriously preventable death and injury in our hospitals. Let’s let people start to figure out the real causes of death — and the near misses.”
Over the study period, the ME identified 1,300 deaths that were the result of operations. Of those, 472, or 36 percent, were chalked up to “technical” complications, including bleeding and ruptures along surgical sutures.
The ME’s Office cited 1,171 deaths from non-operative complications, with 295 caused by medication.
Of the 312 fatal accidents, the majority, 224, were caused by blunt injuries from falls; 31 were choking cases caused by food, dentures or a feeding tube; eight were from incorrect doses of medication; and 12 were procedural or surgical blunders.
The DOH’s annual vital-statistics report lists only a fraction of deaths, listing them as “complications of medical and surgical care.”
That’s because guidelines implemented by the Centers for Disease Control prevent the DOH from using the ME’s classification system. “This requires them to base the coding on the cause of death. Since the cause of death can only be three lines, the complication information may not be recognized,” study co-author Dr. James Gill said.