“If you were admitted to hospital tomorrow in any country … your chances of being subjected to an error in your care would be something like 1 in 10. Your chances of dying due to an error in health care would be 1 in 300.”-Professor Liam Donaldson, World Health Organization envoy

The United Nations released a study saying that hospitals in the ‘western’ world are sure places to catch a deadly disease, or die from mistakes made by medical personnel.

The UN World Health Organization discovered that your chances of dying in a hospital, by medical errors, are far greater than dying in a plane crash.

More interestingly, Canada takes the number one spot for worst hospital related infections, at an 11.6% infection rate.  The European Union has a 7% rate, followed by the United States with 4.5%.

But lets put that U.S. rate of 4.5%, which sounds low, into real numbers.  According to the research 1.7 million infections are acquired in U.S. hospitals, which leads to 100,000 deaths each year.  That’s 100,000 people in the U.S. being killed because of hospital uncleanliness.

Catching an infection while in the hospital means a longer stay and more treatment.  The study suggests that the increased infection rate while being in the hospital, along with medical mistakes, are partly to blame for increasing medical costs.

To be sure most health care systems around the world are in trouble, but, what surprised the WHO researchers is that the developed ‘western’ world has made no progress in improving medical care inside hospitals.  Former United Kingdom chief medical officer Liam Donaldson, said this: “It shows that health care in general worldwide still has a long way to go.  Health care has not achieved the level of safety of many other high-risk industries.”