The numbers are rightly shocking: In just under two years, the Department of Veterans Affairs admits to having made nearly 3,000 medical errors nationwide, killing almost one in four of those who received erroneous treatment or medications.

Yet those numbers would likely be typical of medical mistakes made nationwide by other public and private hospitals, according to one quasi-federal agency — and the VA’s results ought to be the launching point for national, mandatory reporting of medical mistakes.

According to a recent VA report, from June 1997 to December 1998, the VA had 2,927 “adverse effects” — ranging from prescribing the wrong medicines, to operations performed on the wrong body part or wrong person, to cases of medical procedures being bungled.

Considering that the VA system nationwide handles about 750,000 inpatient cases and 31 million outpatient clients every year, that means an error rate of about 1 in every 10,000 cases. That’s statistically small, but when one considers that basic life and health are at stake, any error rate is too high.

That is a significant part of why the National Academies has called mandatory reporting of medical mistakes by all hospitals. Congress required the VA — America’s largest operator of health care facilities — to do so in June 1997, but other hospitals make such reports on a voluntary basis.

The National Academies, a government-chartered group assigned with advising Congress on issues such as health, science and technical matters, estimates that between 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year as a result of health care errors — more people than are killed annually by highway accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. But without more specific numbers on how many people are being hurt by hospitals, the severity of those accidents or any other information about such mishaps, it’s impossible to reduce the prevalence or severity of such mistakes, the National Academies correctly argues.

It’s apparent that the VA system nationwide has some significant work to do in dealing with medical mishaps; to the agency’s credit, it has been working on limiting mistakes. For example, the VA now uses bar-coded medicine labels at many hospitals, which reduces the likelihood of misprescribed medications; increased staff training and better technology have been put into place, too.

The object at the VA — as it should be at all health care facilities — is to reduce the number of mistakes made by hospital staffs.

The Hippocratic oath urges medical professionals to “abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.” Reporting the mistakes one makes is the first step to overcoming them. The VA has taken that step; other hospitals should follow.