Hospital records don’t make note of all medical errors and problems with treatments, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics. The investigators set out to find out how family-reported errors and adverse events compared with those in hospital safety records.
Attending to Parents’ Reports of Problems:
The researchers collected data from three sources: they talked to the parents of hospitalized children; they interviewed the health care workers taking care of the young patients; and they scrutinized the children’s medical records. They discovered that parents, doctors and nurses agreed, for the most part, on errors and serious reactions affecting the children.
But the medical records missed nearly half of the errors families reported and almost a quarter of the adverse events. The hospital incident reports only picked up about one-fifth of the problems families reported. They identified one third of the serious reactions.
This suggests that patient safety data on pediatric wards could be greatly improved by including parents’ reports in official hospital records. The researchers conclude:
“Families provide unique safety information and have the potential to be valuable partners in safety surveillance conducted by both hospitals and researchers.”
