In the United States medical error is estimated to result in 44,000 to 98,000 unnecessary deaths and 1,000,000 excess injuries each year. It is estimated that in a typical 100 to 300 bed hospital in the United States, excess costs of $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 attributable to prolonged stays and complications just due to medication errors occur yearly.

Medical care is frequently compared adversely to aviation, in that, while many of the factors which lead to error are similar, aviation's error management protocols are much more effective.

Medical errors are associated with inexperienced clinicians, new procedures, extremes of age,

complex care and urgent care.

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).