Addressing the effects of adverse events: study provides insights into patient safety at Canadian hospitals.

We live in an exciting era, where new therapeutic discoveries move quickly from the research bench to the patient bedside. Yet in implementing these discoveries and providing care, defences sometimes fail, resulting in a preventable adverse event. On May 25, 2004, the first national study to examine the problem of adverse events in Canadian hospitals, led by the authors of this paper and involving researchers from seven Canadian universities, was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). Funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the Canadian Adverse Events Study found that, in 2000, the overall rate of adverse events was 7.5 per 100 patients admitted, not including pediatric, obstetric and psychiatric admissions. In other words, approximately 185,000 of the 2.5 million similar medical and surgical admissions in Canadian hospitals in 2000 were associated with an adverse event. In the study, we used a definition of adverse event that has been applied to similar studies elsewhere. An adverse event is an “unintended injury or complication resulting in death, disability or prolonged hospital stay caused by healthcare management rather than the patient’s underlying condition.”