Unintentional death incentives and their mechanisms

Unintentional Death
The role of patient safety in quality care should be front and center; however, as the IOM (2000) reported, too many patients are dying as a result of medical error. To protect patients, the IOM recommended several courses of action that the federal government could undertake in order to address this issue. This resulted in the development and application of several federal initiatives that are used to prevent unintentional death from medical errors.
These initiatives were detailed in the FDA’s Federal Actions to Reduce Medical Errors and Their Impact.  Some of the initiatives include incorporating a mandatory reporting system that would allow the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to collect information on medical errors and resulting deaths from the more than 500 hospitals and clinics operated by the Department of Defense (serving 8 million patients) to better understand the phenomenon and why these accidents occur. Additionally, Congress set aside $20 million to fund a Center for Patient Safety within the AHRQ with the purpose being to “set national goals for patient safety, track progress in meeting these goals, and issue an annual report to the President and Congress on patient safety” (FDA, 2001).
The federal initiatives were designed to address the issue of unintentional death from medical error by promoting safer policies and procedures, security checks, and by collecting information on accidents when they did occur so that they could be studied and analyzed to identify the factors that contributed to the adverse income. In this manner, the federal government aimed to reduce the rate of incidence over time via better policy guidelines and via education and research.
References
FDA. (2001). Federal Actions to Reduce Medical Errors and Their Impact. Retrieved from https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/MedicationErrors/ucm115792.htm
IOM. (2000). To err is human. Retrieved from https://www.nap.edu/read/9728/chapter/1#ii