17 percent of Canadians subject to medical, medication, or laboratory errors. Commonwealth Study

17 percent of Canadians subject to medical, medication, or laboratory errors. Commonwealth Study

20 percent of Americans and Australians report that they were subject to medical, medication, or laboratory errors.

Evidence of patient safety risks and their impact on patients continues to emerge, both in hospitals and community settings.

HEALTHCARE LAGGING IN CREATING EFFECTIVE SAFETY LEARNING SYSTEMS. Seven Country Study

G. Ross Baker, co-author of The (2004) Canadian Adverse Events Study. Can. Med. Assoc. J., May 2004) calls for "deeper capacity" to deal with ongoing changes in healthcare.

In his editorial to the fourth special issue of the journal Healthcare Quarterly dedicated to patient safety, he quotes a colleague's words: "safety is a dynamic and emerging state that is continually renegotiated as things change. And in healthcare everything changes all the time ... so [we need] to develop a deeper capacity to deal with these issues so we can understand the complexity that we are working in."

May 2009 marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Canadian Adverse Events Study. He now writes:
• Evidence of risks and their impact on patients continues to emerge, both in hospitals (where the evidence is considerable) and community settings (where it is not).
• New technologies that improve diagnostic capabilities or offer therapeutic benefits often carry risks.
• Even if these risks are carefully calibrated, this knowledge is not always widely shared.
• Methods and tools alone may be insufficient to create an environment supporting safer care.
• Hand hygiene is "widely recognized as a critical practice for reducing healthcare-associated infections, many audits find only modest levels of acceptable practice."

Many experts, he writes, believe that healthcare has lagged in creating the types of effective safety learning systems seen in other high-risk industries.

Full issue available here:
http://www.longwoods.com/home.php?cat=604.

Self reported errors discussed here:
http://www.longwoods.com/product.php?productid=20967&cat=604&page=1

To contact the Editor please write G. Ross Baker (ross.baker@utoronto.ca).

PDF formats available here
Download article PDF here: http://www.longwoods.com/view.php?aid=20967&cat=604
Download Full Issue PDF here: http://www.longwoods.com/view.php?aid=604&cat=604