Misdiagnosing

In light of our class discussions in the last few weeks on the importance of acquiring correct information in the field of public health, the bbc ran this article on misdiagnosed patients in the UK. While the 5% noted in the article represents a small proportion of the overall population, an improper diagnosis will have an affect on the treatment plan of a patient. Given, that according to the article, a further 1 million people in the UK have diabetes but don't know, many more people could be affected by procedural errors like this.

This scenario presents the need to be more efficient in disease diagnosis. There represents a need to create tests that reduce the likelihood of false negatives or positives. In addition, steps need to be taken to remove administrative errors such as incorrectly recording the patient's disease status. If the goal of healthcare is to provide the appropriate and necessary treatments to ease the burden of disease for each and every person in the population, then these errors need to be further minimized. In addition, England's medical systems has a much better infrastructure in dealing with and lessening these errors. Other countries that may not have an as established healthcare system will probably have a much higher rate of these errors and may potentially have adverse effects on the disease prevention in these countries. Such mistakes with far-reaching diseases like malaria or cholera could be devastating.