Disclosing medical errors to patients: a status report in 2007.

摘要

In the past decade, evidence has shown that adverse events, including errors, occur frequently in health care. An adverse event is defined by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute as "harm that results from an unexpected and unintentional occurrence in health care delivery." Some adverse events are preventable - these events can be called errors. Some errors do not cause harm to patients, either by chance or because the error was corrected before harm could occur; these are called near misses. Studies from multiple countries, including a Canadian study by Baker and colleagues, have estimated that adverse events affect up to 7.5% of patients admitted to acute care hospitals. Baker and colleagues estimated that 37% of those adverse events could be considered preventable. In response, leaders in the patient-safety movement have called for the system defects that underlie most errors to be corrected, as well as improvement in the recognition and reporting of errors and the disclosure of harmful errors to patients and their families.