Washington ? Citing statistics that one in 10 hospital patients are victims of preventable medical mistakes, the World Health Organization on Wednesday announced an initiative to create a “culture of safety” in health care.

“Improved health care is perhaps humanity’s greatest achievement of the last 100 years,” WHO Director-General Dr. Lee Jong-wook said. “Improving patient safety in clinics and hospitals is in many cases the best way there is to protect the advances we have made in health care.”

The initiative, the World Alliance for Patient Safety, will bring together governments, civil society organizations, scientists and researchers to develop and share strategies for reducing medical mistakes. Among the major partners are the United States, Britain and Australia.

The WHO cited figures from studies that said 10 percent of hospital patients in the world’s industrialized countries suffer from medical mistakes, which can lead to serious disability or even death.

In the United States, a study by the federal Institute of Medicine estimated in 1999 that 44,000 to 98,000 hospital deaths annually are caused by “medical errors” — claiming more lives than car accidents, breast cancer or AIDS.

The medical error rate is suspected to be even higher in the developing world, where under-equipped hospitals, second-rate medications, a lack of technology and poor hygiene are major factors.

“Human error is inevitable,” said Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer of the British Department of Health and chairman of the WHO coalition on patient safety, By raising awareness of the issue, Donaldson said, “We can reduce error, but most importantly, we can reduce its impact.”

One-fourth of all medical errors are caused by medication mistakes, he said. The causes can range from sloppy note taking — especially doctors’ illegible handwriting — to different medications that come in deceptively similar packaging. Patients may be given too high or too low a dose, the wrong medication, or no medication when one is needed.

Electronic health records can reduce the errors associated with paperwork, but is too costly for many countries and health providers. For now, the WHO will focus on creating a clear and consistent set of medical terminology, symbols, and principles to cut down on translation errors.

Blaming individuals is not the solution, Donaldson said. Doctors or hospital staff who recognize that they made a critical mistake in treating a patient might not report their failure for fear of lawsuits or losing their jobs. Instead, hospitals should foster a culture in which mistakes are admitted and studied so they are not repeated again.

Sleepy interns

Also Wednesday, a Harvard study found that doctors-in-training made one-third more serious mistakes, from prescribing overdoses to sticking a tube in the wrong vein, during typically long shifts than they did during “short” 16-hour ones.

At the same time, those first-year interns were wired up with electrodes to measure how often their sleepy eyes rolled, and they ended up nodding off more than five times a night during long shifts.

Together, the findings suggest that recently imposed limits on how many hours new doctors can work do not go far enough, the researchers said.

The studies were the first to measure the real-life toll that sleep deprivation takes on interns’ medical judgment. The results were reported Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“There are currently more than 100,000 physicians-in-training in the United States, most of whom work these kinds of 30-hour shifts on a regular basis,” said Dr. Christopher P. Landrigan, who led the study on medical errors.

Since July 2003, interns at U.S. hospitals have been limited to a four-week average of 80 hours a week. Also, they cannot work with patients for more than 24 hours straight, though six hours can be tacked on at the end for paperwork and classes.

“These long shifts are perhaps more hazardous than the number of hours in the work week,” Landrigan said.