Nearly 1/4 of ICU transfers or deaths in hospital could be due to missed or delayed diagnoses

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-01-09 10:33

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US researchers looked into close to 2500 patient records for people who were sent to the ICU or had died in hospital, and say doctors had missed the diagnosis or had given a delayed diagnosis 23% of the time. They add that 17% of these errors caused harm to the patients, or lead to their death. An attached editorial author says that, while these results are striking, it is also important to highlight that the people involved in the research would have been the sickest of patients, and may have had a poor outcome regardless of the errors.