ObjectiveTo contextualise the degree of harm that comes from unsafe medical care compared with individual health conditions using the global burden of disease (GBD), a metric to determine how much suffering is caused by individual diseases.DesignAnalytic modelling of observational studies investigating unsafe medical care in countries’ inpatient care settings, stratified by national income, to identify incidence of seven adverse events for GBD modelling. Observational studies were generated through a comprehensive search of over 16 000 articles written in English after 1976, of which over 4000 were appropriate for full text review.ResultsThe incidence, clinical outcomes, demographics and costs for each of the seven adverse events were collected from each publication when available. We used disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) lost as a standardised metric to measure morbidity and mortality due to specific adverse events. We estimate that there are 421 million hospitalisations in the world annually, and approximately 42.7 million adverse events. These adverse events result in 23 million DALYs lost per year. Approximately two-thirds of all adverse events, and the DALYs lost from them, occurred in low-income and middle-income countries.ConclusionsThis study provides early evidence that adverse events due to medical care represent a major source of morbidity and mortality globally. Though suffering related to the lack of access to care in many countries remains, these findings suggest the importance of critically evaluating the quality and safety of the care provided once a person accesses health services. While further refinements of the estimates are needed, these data should be a call to global health policymakers to make patient safety an international priority.

While the private sector is an important health care provider in many low and middle income countries (LMICs), its role in relation to progress towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) varies. Drawing on a review of the published and grey literature, we explore the factors that affect private sector contribution to UHC: i.e. we are interested in the overall impact on system outcomes such as . Evidence on the performance of both the private and public healthcare sectors is used to examine the characteristics of private providers that are associated with their performance, and the implications for how these factors might interrelate to influence progress towards UHC. Studies of private sector performance have focused on three main dimensions: quality, equity of access, and efficiency. We found that the characteristics of patients, the structures of both the public and private sectors, and the regulation of the sector influence the types of health services delivered, and outcomes. Combined with characteristics of private providers including their size, objectives, and technical competence the interaction of these factors influences how the sector performs within different contexts. Changing the performance of the private sector will require interventions which target the sector as a whole, rather than individual providers alone. In particular, the performance of the private sector appears to be intrinsically linked to the structure and performance of the public sector, which suggests that deriving population benefit from the private health sector requires a regulatory response focused on the health sector as a whole. Key messages The critical policy relevant question about the private sector is not its performance in isolation, or relative to the public sector, but the extent to which it supports or detracts from progress towards Universal Health Coverage  There is a dearth of evidence on factors affecting system level performance, reflecting the complexity and heterogeneity of the private health sector and the difficulty in exploring the inter-relationships of factors at the system level, and their effect on overall performance.  Deriving population benefit from the private health sector will require interventions which target the sector as a whole, rather than individual providers alone.

U.S. citizens spent $5,267 per capita for health care in 2002--53 percent more than any other country. Two possible reasons for the differential are supply constraints that create waiting lists in other countries and the level of malpractice litigation and defensive medicine in the United States. Services that typically have queues in other countries account for only 3 percent of U.S. health spending. The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims is estimated at $6.5 billion in 2001, only 0.46 percent of total health spending. The two most important reasons for higher U.S. spending appear to be higher incomes and higher medical care prices.

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Financial modeling of implementation of the IPS standard using conservative assumptions demonstrated cost savings to hospitals. Only under worst-case scenario assumptions did intensivist staffing result in additional cost to hospitals. These economic findings must be interpreted in the context of significant reductions in patient morbidity and mortality rates also associated with intensivist staffing. Given the magnitude of its clinical and financial impact, hospital leaders should be asking "how to" rather than "whether to" implement The Leapfrog Group's ICU Physician Staffing standard.