patient harm

Exploring events that should never happen in Dentistry

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Recently a few interesting articles have been published to explore what are called never events or serious patient safety incidents that should not occur if appropriate preventive measures are implemented in dentistry. However, these articles and their analysis are all tailored to the U.K. The first article is titled “Patient safety in dentistry: development of a candidate ‘never event’ list for primary care” written by Black et al. in the British Dental Journal (vol. 222, no. 10, pp. 782-788, Published May 26, 2017). The second article is titled “Developing agreement on never events in primary care dentistry: an international eDelphi study,” written by Ensaldo-Carrasco et al. in the British Dental Journal (vol. 224, no. 9, pp. 733-740, Published May 11, 2018). Prior to these articles there was not much clear research done on never events in dentistry. The best article … Read more

Tips to Prevent Medical Errors – AHRQ

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The largely ineffective Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has a list of 20 Tips to Help Prevent Medical Errors  http://www.ahrq.gov/consumer/20tips.htm Number 20 on the list is  “Learn about your condition and treatments by asking your doctor and nurse and by using other reliable sources.” It then suggests to ask your doctor if the treatment is based on the latest evidence. The way this is presented it seems to say that doctors and nurses often do not always present treatment options based on the latest evidence. As argued by Shannon Brownlee, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0710.brownlee.html the U.S. is clearly in need of an “… independant agency that would fund systematic reviews of the medical literature, as well as clinical trials to test the comparative effectiveness of everything from drugs to treatments” Unfortunately the current AHRQ is not performing this service as it … Read more

Patient Harm in Medical Care

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The New England Journal of Medicine has recently published an article titled “Temporal Trends in Rates of Patient Harm Resulting from Medical Care.” This article was conducted by Christopher Landrigan and 5 other researches, appeared in the November 25, 2010, edition and you can download and view it at http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMsa1004404 The article explores a random sample of 10 hospitals located in the state of North Carolina in the U.S.  A total of 2,341 patients were looked at from this sample and 588 of them had what was identified as a harm meaning that the patient was somehow harmed as a result of medical procedures, medications, or something else that was performed or given during their care. “Of 588 harms that were identified, 245 (41.7%) were temporary harms requiring intervention…  251 (42.7%) were temporary harms requiring initial or prolonged hospitalization. An … Read more