Medical error
preventable adverse effect of medical care, whether evident or harmful to the patient or not
A medical error is a preventable adverse effect of care ("iatrogenesis"), whether or not it is evident or harmful to the patient. This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis or treatment of a disease, injury, syndrome, behavior, infection, or other ailments.
The incidence of medical errors varies depending on the setting. The World Health Organization has named adverse outcomes due to patient care that is unsafe as the 14th causes of disability and death in the world, with an estimated 1/300 people being potentially harmed by healthcare practices around the world.
Definitions
A medical error occurs when a health-care provider chooses an inappropriate method of care or improperly executes an appropriate method of care. Medical errors are often described as "human errors in healthcare".
There are many types of medical error, from minor to major, and causality is often poorly determined.
There are many taxonomies for classifying medical errors.
Definitions of diagnostic error
Defining diagnostic error is important for measuring its frequency, identifying its causes, and implementing strategies to reduce harm, steps that are essential for improving patient safety. The complexity of diagnosis as both a process (the act of arriving at a diagnosis) and a label (the name of the assigned disease) has led to multiple, overlapping definitions and there is no single definition of diagnostic error.
The public source identifies “Medical error” as preventable adverse effect of medical care, whether evident or harmful to the patient or not. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Medical, error and preventable.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Medical error”, the useful work is to connect “preventable adverse effect of medical care, whether evident or harmful to the patient or not” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q460433. The Library of Congress control number is sh85082928. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Medical error” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.