Patient Safety

Patient safety is an important challenge for all modern health services. Healthcare is a risky business; it brings together sick and vulnerable patients with medical services and often complex technology and requires the effective coordination of many people. Complex systems in any industry are prone to human error [1, 2]. No matter how committed, skilled and hard working the staff, the complexity of the organization and the nature of human behaviour means that unwelcome incidents do happen and errors are made. Very few errors are due to a lack of care or commitment from health care professionals or from a desire to deliberately harm patients [1].

Patient safety incidents also have emotional, psychological, social and economic consequences for the families involved, and for healthcare staff; so it is vital that we strive to reduce their frequency and severity. Major reports and studies from developing countries around the world consistently demonstrate that there are real opportunities to make healthcare safer through improvements in the systems for delivering that care [3, 4].

An international perspective on the rate of patient safety incidents Patient safety is an international concern and broadly similar levels of patient safety incidents have been found across health

Historically, medical errors were revealed retrospectively through morbidity and mortality committees and malpractice claims data. Prominent studies of medical error have used retrospective chart review to quantify adverse event rates [10, 11]. While a collection of data in this manner yields important epidemiologic information, it is costly and provides little insight into potential error reduction strategies. Moreover, chart review only detects documented adverse events and often does not capture information regarding their causes. Important errors that produce no injury may go completely undetected by this method