Risk management in pediatric surgery

Abstract

Although a proper statistical comparison with literature complication rates is not feasible, our experience confirms the importance of quality-control audit in health care systems. Prolonged observation, long-term follow up, and comparison with previous results will represent our future goal.

Near-miss events are really missed! Reflections on incident reporting in a department of pediatric surgery

“…We adopted our already published incident-reporting system extending it to the whole department of surgery [3].…”

“…gov.it/) [3][4][5][6]. -Adverse event is defined as any event that caused damage to the patient (http://www.salute.gov.it/) [3][4][5][6].…”

“…Since 2005, at our institution there has been an increasing interest in developing a common strategy to standardize the perioperative track of all pediatric surgical patients, with the aim of identifying critical points [3]. In 2007, we introduced incident reporting in our pediatric surgery unit to assess the frequency and etiologies of surgical and organizational events, detect potentially avoidable errors and define preventive strategies [3].…”

“…Unexpected events, although unwanted, may occur during hospitalization and possibly lead to injury of the patient [3][4][5][6]. Morbidity and mortality associated with medical practice, although declining, are still well documented in the literature; therefore, quality assurance programs have been introduced in many centers [7].…”

“…In 2007, we introduced incident reporting in our pediatric surgery unit to assess the frequency and etiologies of surgical and organizational events, detect potentially avoidable errors and define preventive strategies [3].…”