re: another stepping stone One in five Australian operations fail
Saturday Nov 11 07:52 AEDT
The 20 per cent failure rate of surgery in Australian hospitals is costing billions of dollars, inflating the cost of private health care, an insurance chief says.
Second operations are required one in five times to rectify problems caused by infections, medical errors and the poor quality of prosthetic hips and knees, The Weekend Australian newspaper reports.
Figures from Australia's largest private health insurer, Medibank Private, reveal the rate of hospital-acquired infection is more than double previous estimates.
"It's very expensive for patients, it's inconvenient and sometimes very dangerous," said Medibank managing director George Savvides.
He said Australia should aim to halve the failure rate, which is the same in private and public hospitals as "it's often the same staff doing the procedures in the public and private systems".
Reducing the ballooning cost of medical mistakes could have a significant effect on the cost of health insurance, he said.
"In the private hospital sector, about $300 million a year would be wasted. It would be much more across the entire health sector," Mr Savvides said.
"If we could wave a wand and reduce 15 per cent of health expenditure costs, we would be able to freeze the cost of premiums for two years and the rise in Medicare costs would halt."
Canberra Hospital director of infectious diseases Peter Collignon said doctors weren't doing enough to reduce the rate of complications caused by potentially lethal infections.
There should be thorough investigations when patients die of infections in hospital, he said.
©AAP 2006
PBI
premier bionics limited
