16% of our hospitalised patients will suffer a significant adverse event which is totally unrelated to their original medical condition . This translates as 1 patient in 6 , which is four times the reported occurrence of medical error incidents in the United States , and a full 6% higher than Britain's 10% error rate .
18 , 000 Australian patients die each year as a direct result of avoidable injuries and complications inflicted from withn our health system environments .
Another 50 , 000 Australian patients per year are left with permanent disabilities , and hundreds of thousands more are avoidably injured to some greater or lesser degree .
80 , 000 Australian patients per year are hospitalised due to medication errors , syphoning a massive $350m from the Federal Health Budget annually .
And these figures do not take into account the recognised errors which take place in other clinical outpatient settings such as GP surgeries , radiology suites , and other outpatient clinics where the error rate has been found to be at 23% in one Sydney study .