About 10 per cent of hospital patients suffer an adverse medical event, and 1 per cent of this group will die as a result, the conference heard.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the UK's chief medical officer and the chairman of the World Health Organisation's World Alliance for Patient Safety, gave delegates a number of examples of cases in which medical error had cost patients their lives and he appealed to doctors to listen to patients and their families and to stop being defensive. He said they had to move from covering up mistakes to sharing details of them and learning from them.
One of the cases of medical error he cited was that of a baby in the UK who died at two months of age after being given 15,000 units of an anticoagulant instead of 1,500 units because her prescription said she should be given 1,500U and the U was almost closed at the top to look like a zero.
The hospital where the incident took place then banned abbreviations. In another case a 43-year-old woman was infused with a dose of chemotherapy in four hours when it should have been given over four days. The pump was wrongly calibrated and she died a few days later as a result of the overdose.
Mary Vasseghi, from Drumcondra in Dublin, told how her 18-year-old son Darius, a fencing champion, dropped dead on the bathroom floor in 2005, a victim of sudden cardiac death in the young. She said he had attended doctors in France and Iran over the years suffering from tiredness and breathlessness but his condition was never diagnosed.
Neither had it been picked up by doctors in Ireland even though he had lived here for three years before his death. "Nobody ever looked at his heart . . . this was a system failure in three countries . . . the symptoms he had should have directed doctors to a cardiac assessment," she said.
Sara Yaron, from Israel, recalled for delegates how her daughter became ill at the age of seven and was diagnosed with epilepsy. She was treated for the condition for seven years when her parents took hear abroad for a second opinion. It emerged she had a brain tumour, which wasn't malignant, but it was so large at this stage it couldn't be fully removed without leaving her paralysed. She died at the age of 34 years.
The experience has prompted Ms Yaron to train as a lawyer and she specialises in medical negligence cases. In each case, she said, she can see when a doctor "falls in love with his diagnosis". She cautioned against this.