Abstract Why is the area important? A sub-group of rare but serious patient safety incidents, known as ‘never events,’ judged to be ‘avoidable.’ There growing interest in this concept international care settings, including UK primary care. However, issues have been raised regarding well-intentioned coupling ‘preventable harm’ with zero tolerance especially around lack evidence for such harm eve...

Adverse events (AEs) occur in health care and may result in harm to patients especially in the field of surgery. Our objective was to analyze AEs in surgical patient care from a nationwide perspective and to analyze the frequency of AEs that may be preventable. In total 19,141 randomly selected admissions in 63 Swedish hospitals were reviewed each month during 2013 using a 2-stage record review...

BACKGROUND Methods to identify preventable adverse events typically have low yield and efficiency. We refined the methods of Institute of Healthcare Improvement's Global Trigger Tool (GTT) application and leveraged electronic health record (EHR) data to improve detection of preventable adverse events, including diagnostic errors. METHODS We queried the EHR data repository of a large health sy...

Tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable premature mortality and disability in European and other developed countries. This chapter first reviews strategies that (1) aim to reduce harm to non-smokers (public smoking bans and reduced ignition propensity cigarettes) and (2) aim to reduce harm to the smoker who is unable or unwilling to quit nicotine use, namely, regulating the harmfuln...

Medication errors, drug related problems and patient safety Patient safety is arguably the most important issue facing pharmacy practice today. In this issue of the Translator the prevalence and incidence of drug related morbidities is examined, and possible solutions and the impact of medication reconciliation are discussed. ■ Seventy percent of hospitalizations for drug-related causes are dee...

The word “Iatrogenic” comes from the Greek language "iatros” which means doctor or healer and “Gennan” means as a result. “Iatrogenesis or iatrogenic effect” is preventable harm resulting from treatments or advice to patients. “Iatrogenesis” is a very common, often preventable, hazard of treatment and is associated significantly with patient mortality and cost. Since the time Napoleon “when adv...

Background Hospital-acquired diagnoses (HAD) not only lengthen inpatients’ recovery times but also incur significant additional costs of care. The focus of previous research has been on ‘highly preventable’ indicator conditions and the cost of individual episodes, rather than on the entire spectrum of unintentional patient harm. As well, little attention has been paid to the frequency of HADs a...