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Adverse events and patient care-related adverse events are a challenging universal problem, among elder residents of geriatric facilities. The aim of this study was to examine which types of adverse events are characteristic of the geriatric center studied and which of the nursing staff reported this event.

Data were retrieved from the computerized adverse event management system at a large geriatric center in central Israel, and all adverse events reported over the past three years were examined.

The study findings indicate that the most common type of adverse event was falls. Older nurses with greater seniority in the facility show a higher tendency to report adverse events. In addition, registered nurses were found to report more often than practical nurses.

This study highlights the important role that nurses can play in reporting and reducing adverse events. The role of the nurse is becoming increasingly complex, especially in geriatric facilities, which serve people with complex mental and physical states who are more susceptible to adverse events to begin with.

Despite the large number of adverse events, few studies have been undertaken on adverse events in geriatrics in general, and in nursing homes and long-term facilities in particular. Answers to these questions will enable improvement in the quality of care provided and ensure a safe care environment for residents. Systematically examining types of adverse events and the characteristics of those who do and do not report them, can contribute to improvement of processes in the healthcare system in general, and in the facility in particular. Additionally, efficient investigation can improve the behavior of those who enable adverse events.

The aim of this study was to develop a multi‐professionally agreed list of adverse events, which may act as a prompt for clinical incident reporting in trauma and orthopaedics and to determine what healthcare professionals understand by the term adverse event. A modified Delphi process with healthcare professionals working in trauma and orthopaedics (242) in three NHS trusts was performed. The process involved initial brainstorming sessions, a two‐round Likert‐style postal questionnaire and final focus group discussion. The initial brainstorming sessions generated a list of 224 adverse events to be included in the first round of the postal questionnaire. They included 83 causes of adverse events, 36 health and safety related adverse events and 105 clinical adverse events. Following the second round questionnaire and focus group discussion, a final list of 20 adverse events was produced. There were variations between professional groups in terms of validity scoring of individual adverse events. Overall, medical staff gave a lower rating to the adverse events than the other two professional groups. There were also variations between professional groups in terms of response rates. The modified Delphi process proved to be a successful tool for generating a multi‐professionally agreed list of adverse events and for understanding what healthcare professionals understand by the term adverse event.

Purpose – Patient safety and adverse events continue to present significant challenges to the US health care delivery system. Mandated reporting of adverse events can be a mechanism to “coerce” hospitals to identify, evaluate, and ultimately improve the quality and safety of patient care. The objective of this study is to determine if the coercion of mandated reporting impacts hospital patient safety scores.

Methods – We utilize the US News and World Report 2012–2013 Best Hospital Rankings which includes patient safety data from US teaching hospitals. The dependent variable is a composite measure of six indicators of patient safety during and after surgery. The independent variable is state mandated reporting of hospital adverse events. Three control variables are included: Magnet accreditation status, surgical volume, and the percentage of surgical admissions.

Findings – Using ordered logistic regression (n = 670 hospitals) we find a positive, but not significant, relationship between state mandated reporting and better patient safety scores.

Implications – This finding suggests that regulatory policy may not actually prompt performance improvement, and our data point to the need for further study of both formal and informal processes to manage patient safety within the hospital.

Originality – While increased reporting of adverse events has been linked to hospitals providing safer care, no research to date has examined whether or not state-level mandates actually lead to improvements in patient safety.

The risk of adverse events in a hospital evaluation is an important process in healthcare management. It involves several technical, social, and economical aspects. The purpose of this paper is to propose an integrated approach to evaluate the risk of adverse events in the hospital sector.

This paper aims to provide a decision-making framework to evaluate hospital service. Three well-known methods are applied. More specifically are proposed the following methods: analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology developed by Thomas L. Saaty in the 1970s; decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) to construct interrelations between criteria/factors and VIKOR method, a commonly used multiple-criteria decision analysis technique for determining a compromise solution and improving the quality of decision making.

The example provided has demonstrated that the proposed approach is an effective and useful tool to assess the risk of adverse events in the hospital sector. The results could help the hospital identify its high performance level and take appropriate measures in advance to prevent adverse events. The authors can conclude that the promising results obtained in applying the AHP–DEMATEL–VIKOR method suggest that the hybrid method can be used to create decision aids that it simplifies the shared decision-making process.

This paper presents a novel approach based on the integration of AHP, DEMATEL and VIKOR methods. The final aim is to propose a robust methodology to overcome disadvantages associated with each method.

An adverse health event can affect women’s work capacity as they need time to recover. The institutional framework in the Netherlands provides employment protection during the first two years after the diagnosis. In this study, we have assessed the extent to which women’s employment is affected in the short- and long term by an adverse health event. We have used administrative Dutch data which follow women aged 25 to 55 years for four years after a medical diagnosis. We found that diagnosed women start leaving employment during the protection period and four years later they were about one percentage point less likely to be employed. Women in permanent employment did not reduce their employment during the protection period and reduced their employment with less than 0.5 percentage points thereafter. Furthermore, we found minor adjustments in the working hours in the short term and no adjustments in the long term. Lastly, we found that for wages, and not for employment and hours, adjustments could be related to the severity of the health condition: women diagnosed with temporary health conditions experienced a short-term wage penalty of about 0.5–1.7 percent and those diagnosed with chronic and incapacitating conditions experienced a long-term wage penalty of about 0.5 percent, while women diagnosed with some chronic and nonincapacitating conditions, such as respiratory conditions, experienced no wage changes in the short or long term.

The purpose of this article is to assess the reliability of an in‐depth analysis on causation, preventability, and disability by two separate review teams on five selected adverse events in acute hospitals: pressure ulcer, postoperative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis, postoperative sepsis, ventilator‐associated pneumonia and postoperative wound infection.

The analysis uses a retrospective medical record review of 1,515 patient records by two independent teams in eight acute Belgian hospitals for the year 2005. The Mann‐Whitney U‐test is used to identify significant differences between the two review teams regarding occurrence of adverse events as well as regarding the degree of causation, preventability, and disability of found adverse events.

Team 1 stated a high probability for health care management causation in 95.5 per cent of adverse events in contrast to 38.9 per cent by Team 2. Likewise, high preventability was considered in 83.1 per cent of cases by Team 1 versus 51.7 per cent by Team 2. Significant differences in degree of disability between the two teams were also found for pressure ulcers, postoperative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis and postoperative wound infection, but not for postoperative sepsis and ventilator‐associated pneumonia.

New insight on the degree of and reasons for the huge differences in adverse event evaluation is provided.

Adverse event monitoring is a problem‐oriented approach to clinical audit and health‐care quality improvement, which was developed and has been widely used in the USA. Briefly explores the technique itself and its evolution. Presents experience gained from the widespread use of the approach in a British acute hospital, and results from one specialty – ophthalmology. Suggests that the study of adverse events in patient care can produce significant improvements in patients’ care, that it is particularly suited to some specialties, and that it should be used alongside other techniques in hospital clinical audit programmes. Concludes that, as the demand for quality‐monitoring information from purchasers and within providers grows, adverse event monitoring may become one of the key techniques for quality assessment and improvement.

This paper aims to determine the one‐year incidence of, and risk factors for, perioperative adverse events during in‐patient and out‐patient anesthesia‐assisted procedures.

A quality assurance database was the primary data source. Outcome variables were death and the occurrence of any adverse event. Risk factors were ASA physical status (PS), age, duration and type of anesthesia care, number of operating rooms running, concurrency level and medical staff. Data were stratified by in‐patient or out‐patient, surgical (e.g. thoracotomy) or non‐surgical (e.g. electroconvulsive therapy), and were analyzed using Chi square, Fisher's exact test and generalized estimating equations.

Of 27,970 procedures, 49.8 percent were out‐patient and greater than 80 percent were surgical. For surgical procedures, adverse event rates were higher for in‐patient than out‐patient procedures (2.11 percent vs. 1.45 percent; p<0.001). For non‐surgical procedures, adverse event rates were similar for in‐patients and out‐patients (0.54 percent vs. 0.36 percent). The types of adverse events differed for in‐patient and out‐patient surgical procedures (p<0.001), but not for non‐surgical procedures. ASA PS, age, duration of anesthesia care, anesthesia type and medical staff assigned to the case were each associated with adverse event rates, but the association depended on the type of procedure.

In‐patient and out‐patient surgical procedures differ in the incidence of perioperative adverse events, and in risk factors, suggesting a need to develop separate monitoring strategies.

The paper is the first to assess perioperative adverse events amongst in‐patient and out‐patient procedures.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the inter-organisational dynamics, in terms of the triggers to spin-off formation and the genealogical inheritance of spin-offs, between a parent characterised by an adverse event and the spin-offs that emerge. The study focusses on the nature of the triggering event, exploring the heterogeneous nature of the processes by which some spin-offs are formed to exploit new opportunities created unexpectedly by an adverse event, and on the genealogical inheritance that forms the pre-entry experience of the founder.

A case study based on interview data with founders of spin-offs, supplemented with interviews with managers and industry experts, and with secondary data sources. The case study is of the spin-offs from a successful firm, Élan Corporation, reported to be the world’s 20th largest drug firm in 2002, that experienced an adverse event in 2002. The Élan case offers the opportunity to focus exclusively on what Buenstorf (2009) refers to as necessity spin-offs. Prior to collecting data it was necessary to identify the population of spin-offs from Élan.

This study extends existing research by identifying “opportunistic spin-offs”: spin-offs that occur in the wake of an adverse event where the entrepreneur exploits an unexpected opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship but does not feel compelled to establish the spin-off. These spin-offs are characterised by “unexpected opportunities”, “opportunistic acquisition of assets” and, perhaps reflecting the seniority and experience of those involved, “alternative employment opportunities”.

Understanding the process of spin-off formation is important because it provides insight into how and why individuals initiate new ventures. Spin-offs are an important source of new firms and an important mechanism in the process of industry evolution. The study contributes to the literature on spin-offs by providing evidence of the heterogeneous nature of spin-offs that occur in the aftermath of an adverse event, leading to the classification of some spin-offs as “opportunistic spin-offs”. The study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating that an important trigger for venture creation is unexpected changes in an individual’s employment circumstances.

The first phase of this study developed a multi‐professionally agreed list of adverse events for clinical incident reporting in Trauma and Orthopaedics. This follow‐up study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the adverse event list.

Two follow‐up questionnaires were sent to healthcare professionals working in Trauma and Orthopaedics in two of the participating National Health Service (NHS) Trusts (n=247 for the first questionnaire and n=240 for the second questionnaire). Trends in routine incident reporting data were also monitored over a two‐year period to determine the impact of the adverse event list on levels of adverse event reporting.

The questionnaires indicated that awareness about the adverse event list was good and improved between questionnaires. However usage of the adverse event list appeared to be poor. Multiple regression analysis with the dependent variable count of orthopaedic incidents suggested that the adverse event list had little, if any impact on levels of reporting in Trauma and Orthopaedics.

The results of this study suggest that a practical tool, such as the adverse event list has little impact on incident reporting levels.