Patient safety
Education in the undergraduate curriculum can reduce adverse events
- By: Felipe Chiodini Machado, Tiago Nery Vasconcelos, Evelize Naomi Inoue, Aline Massami Nagai, Renata Daud-Gallotti
Health care, although ideally designed to promote relief to patients, has the intrinsic capacity to produce or aggravate diseases, promote suffering, and induce incapacity. Adverse events are unintended injuries caused by healthcare management rather than the underlying condition of the patient.1 Population based studies carried out in the United States,123 Australia,4 the United Kingdom,5 New Zealand,6 and Canada7 show that adverse events in hospitals account for between 2.9% and 16.6% of all admissions (box 1). These studies were retrospective based on reviews of patients’ information, including doctor’s notes, nurse information, prescriptions, so the reported rates are probably underestimates.8 Almost half of the reported adverse events in these studies were surgical—wrong patient, wrong procedure, wrong side.1234567 Adverse events involving drugs were the second commonest, making up 20% of all occurrences.1234567
The most risky places were the operating room followed by the ward.1234567 At least half the adverse events reported in these