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Patient safety progress too slow

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, February 10, 2006

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Six years after the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) first report on patient safety and four years after its follow-up, hospitals still don't come close to meeting IOM recommendations for patient safety systems, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report stated that improvements to patient safety systems were progressing too slowly.

The report was based on answers to a 91-question survey completed by 107 hospitals in Utah and Missouri in both 2002 and 2004. Hospitals ranked their adoption of various patient safety tools on a seven-point scale, from no activity to full implementation. The tools included computerized physician order-entry systems, computerized test results, assessments of adverse effects, specific patient safety policies, and the use of data in patient safety programs, among others.

One area that saw an improvement was the voluntary reporting of errors. The percentage of hospitals with systems in place was 69.9% in 2004 compared with 60.9% in 2002, according to the survey.

Source: Modern Healthcare

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