Patient safety
Healthcare discipline that emphasizes the reporting, analysis, and prevention of medical error that often leads to adverse healthcare events. The frequency and magnitude of avoidable adverse patient events was not well known until the 1990s, when multiple countries reported staggering numbers of patients harmed and killed by medical errors. Recognizing that healthcare errors impact 1 in every 10 patients around the world, the World Health Organization calls patient safety an endemic concern.
Indeed, patient safety has emerged as a distinct healthcare discipline supported by an immature yet developing scientific framework. There is a significant transdisciplinary body of theoretical and research literature that informs the science of patient safety.
The resulting patient safety knowledge continually informs improvement efforts such as: applying lessons learned from business and industry, adopting innovative technologies, educating providers and consumers, enhancing error reporting systems, and developing new economic incentives.
“Changing our culture to advance patient safety” served as the theme of the 81st Annual Meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and is an issue of personal importance to the author. To improve outcomes for patients and prevent avoidable surgical errors, neurosurgeons must change the culture that currently exists in the operating room so that safety concerns are of the utmost importance and that each member of the care team has a personal sense of accountability. Doing this will involve implementing and consistently applying systems-based strategies to ensure an adequate level of safeguards; improving communication with all members of the care team and dismantling authority gradients; and maintaining a well-trained and well-rested workforce 1).
Patient safety-related adverse events were strongly associated with in-hospital mortality. Moderate to strong correlations were found between PSIs, HACs, and hospital procedural volume. Patients treated at the highest-volume hospitals had consistently lower rates of mortality, PSIs, and HACs compared with those treated at the lowest-volume facilities 2)