Hospitals have a duty to provide patients with the safest possible conditions in emergency departments to reduce the likelihood for errors and injury to patients in this rather busy environment. When relatives bring their loved ones to the ER, they trust health care professionals to provide them with utmost care and don’t expect them to make mistakes. Unfortunately, medical errors are not rare. According to a study published in BMC Emergency Medicine, human error is to blame for most of untoward incidents in the Emergency Department.

Marleen Smits and colleagues from Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research and EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research, found out that 60% of the causes of unintended incidents in the emergency department are related to human failures.

To examine the nature and causes of unintended events, emergency departments of 10 hospitals in the Netherlands were studied for 8-14 weeks. The hospital staff were asked to report all unintended incidents that could have caused adverse outcomes or harmed the patients.

There were 522 reported unintended events, of which more than half (56%) caused adverse outcome on the patients. The investigators evaluated the main causes of reported unintended events using root cause analysis. Sixty percent of root causes were attributable to human error, followed by organisational (25%) and technical (11%) causes. Analysis linked nearly half of the reported causes to other hospital departments such as the laboratory.

Investigators concluded that event reporting sheds light on diverse unintended events. The information they gathered may help target research and measures to promote patient safety. According to Marleen Smits, patient safety in the emergency setting should be improved. The team also concluded that it seems worthwhile to direct intervention on the collaboration between the emergency room staff and other hospital departments.

Reference:

1. Marleen Smits, Peter P Groenewegen, Danielle RM Timmermans, Gerrit van der Wal and Cordula Wagner. The nature and causes of unintended events reported at ten emergency departments. BMC Emergency Medicine, 2009;

Tags: emergency department, huma error, medical error