An estimated 454,383 people suffered injuries from medical devices – ranging from wheelchair accidents to careless toothbrushing – in one 12-month period from 1999-2000, say researchers from two federal regulatory agencies.
The devices were responsible for an estimated 58,000 hospitalizations, but the accidents were fatal in less than one in a thousand cases.
“A majority of the total estimate appeared to reflect incidents where an unintentional traumatic injury occurred, with no explicit malfunction or personal misuse of the device,” says Brockton J. Hefflin, M.D., the lead researcher.
Falls while using wheelchairs, crutches, canes and walkers were the most commonly recorded injuries. The catalogue of more than 50 types of injuries included an estimated 2,489 toothbrush mishaps classified as “oral laceration resulting from accident while using device.”
Researchers from the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission say the large number of injuries may actually be understated because the study counted only patients treated in emergency rooms. The reporting system would have missed cases treated in doctors’ offices or clinics. Even injuries occurring in hospitals—a logical place for medical device injuries—would have likely been treated elsewhere than the emergency room, they say.
About 42 percent of the device injuries occurred in the home, and 60 percent of the cases happened to women. About 13 percent were admitted to the hospital after emergency room evaluation.
The two agencies used records from 100 hospitals statistically selected to represent 5,000 hospitals across the United States. Results from the smaller group of hospitals was then extrapolated to get a national estimate of medical device injuries. There was a 95 percent chance that the true number of injuries was between 371,000 and 538,000.