Are intensive care units safe?

Patients in ICUs constitute a higher risk group as they are sicker and are subjected to more invasive interventions. It was estimated in one medicalsurgical ICU that around 1.7 errors occur per patient per day.2 Around 29% of these errors had a potential to cause significant harm or death. Given an average length of stay of 3 days in the ICU, this data suggests that nearly all patients who are admitted to an ICU will suffer a potentially life-threatening medical error at some time during their ICU stay. When this data is further extrapolated to cover all ICUs in the United States, it suggests that approximately 85,000 errors can occur every day (of which 24,650 can be potentially life-threatening). And this data applies to an advanced country. Though we have no data to highlight the enormity of the problem in Indian ICUs, we can be sure that safety is a factor that should be causing concern to patients, health care providers and administrators alike.