Here’s a statistic you wouldn’t read about – at least not in any medical association playbook.

John Hopkins University in Baltimore Washington DC has published the results of a study of medical deaths over an eight-year period and discovered that the third highest cause of death in the United States was medical error.

Patient safety experts at John Hopkins calculated that more than 250,000 deaths in the US each year are due to medical error, exceeding the deaths from respiratory disease that kills almost 150,000 people each year.