OBJECTIVE Antibiotics are the most common drugs causing adverse events and they lead to problems to patients and additional costs of the health system. The aim of the study was to evaluate the occurrence of adverse events to antibiotics in inpatients of a hospital. METHODS An extensive drug monitoring was conducted in adult inpatients taking antibiotics in the city of Maringá, Southern Brazil...

44 45 Background and objective: Treatment for gynaecological malignancies is complex and may 46 cause unintended or accidental adverse events (AE). We evaluated the costs of hospitalization 47 associated with those AEs among patients who had an abdominal or laparoscopic procedure 48 for proven or suspected gynaecological cancer at a tertiary gynaecological cancer center in 49 Australia. 50 51 M...

Background: There is conflicting data about prognostic implication of electrocardiographic (ECG) left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) in patients with first non- ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). We aimed to examine the association of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) on admission electrocardiogram with adverse outcomes in patients with NSTEMI. Methods: In the present study, ...

OBJECTIVE Lessons on question content and refinement of a 2003 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-Health Resources Services Administration (AHRQ-HRSA) pilot hospital preparedness assessment tool designed to capture activities in more detail than previous studies are reported in this study. METHODS Responses from fixed-choice questions, including organizational and geographical differe...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the frequency of and to characterize the adverse drug events at a terciary care hospital. METHODS A retrospective review was carried out of 128 medical records from a hospital in Rio de Janeiro in 2007, representing 2,092 patients. The instrument used was a list of triggers, such as antidotes, abnormal laboratory analysis results and sudden suspension of treatment, among...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to demonstrate the use of a systems theory-based accident analysis technique in health care applications as a more powerful alternative to the chain-of-event accident models currently underpinning root cause analysis methods. METHOD A new accident analysis technique, CAST [Causal Analysis based on Systems Theory], is described and illustrated on a set of adverse car...

Manual reviews of health records to identify possible adverse events are time consuming. We are developing a method based on natural language processing to quickly search electronic health records for common triggers and adverse events. Our results agree fairly well with those obtained using manual reviews, and we therefore believe that it is possible to develop automatic tools for monitoring a...

BACKGROUND To improve patient safety, organisations must systematically measure avoidable harms. Clinical surveillance-consisting of prospective case finding and peer review-could improve identification of adverse events (AEs), preventable AEs and potential AEs. The authors sought to describe and compare findings of clinical surveillance on four clinical services in an academic hospital. METHOD...