At the CDC’s medication safety program, Dr. Budnitz says, his focus is less on error reporting and more on tracking backward to see what could have been the cause of harm to a patient—error or not.
“Sometimes, medication-induced harms are caused by things that we classically think of as errors, and sometimes they are not,” he says. “Error reporting is important, but sometimes things don’t fit neatly into the ‘healthcare error’ box—like when a patient misses a follow-up appointment to get their blood thinner level checked, and [the] patient has an unintended bleeding event.”
—Rosemary Gibson, MSc, author, former senior program officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Gibson believes that what’s needed is a public system for the reporting of adverse events in hospitals—like a Consumer Product Safety Commission for healthcare.
“If your child gets injured by a defective crib, there’s a system for you to report that,” she says. “We need that for hospitals. There should be an open capability for reporting events online, in person, any way you want, whether you’re on the hospital staff, a patient, or a family member. Such a system should acknowledge the report, provide for an immediate action step in urgent situations, and offer assistance and support to the person doing the reporting.”
But overall, the response in the healthcare industry to the OIG’s report has been “we need to do more research,” Gibson notes. “We don’t need more research; we need to apply what is known. There are institutions that have made pockets of progress, and patients are alive today and home with their families because we’ve made care safer, but safety still hasn’t become a system property in healthcare.”
Gina Shaw is a freelance writer in New York City.
References
- Levinson DR. Adverse events in hospitals: national incidence among Medicare beneficiaries. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General website. Available at: http://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-06-09-00090.pdf. Accessed May 31, 2012.
- Leape LL. Testimony, United States Congress, House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs; Oct. 12, 1997.
- Rowin EJ. Does error and adverse event reporting by physicians and nurses differ? Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2008;34(9):537-545.