Two decades after a watershed report on errors and unintended injuries in Canada’s hospitals shook the health-care sector, tens of thousands of Canadians continue to be harmed during a hospital stay — many of them, multiple times, new data show.

One in 17 hospitalizations in 2024-2025 — representing more than 153,000 people — resulted in someone experiencing a potentially preventable harm such as a drug error, hospital-acquired infection, a “patient accident” like a fall or radiation burn or some other incident serious enough to require treatment or a prolonged stay, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

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In a quarter of those cases, people experienced two or more harmful “events” during their stay.

The data are based on 2.6 million hospital stay

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