Safety

Canadian study looks at safety of pre-hospital care

Ambulatory Safety Monitor, April 14, 2004

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Healthcare providers must look at pre-hospital care to reduce medical complications, according to a Canadian study at two Ottawa hospitals.

The study, published in the April 13 Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that 12.7% of 502 randomly selected patients experienced an adverse event, and 38% of those were preventable. Two-thirds of the events occurred before the patient arrived at the hospital, either in ambulatory care or at another hospital.

Most of the events were due to drug reactions, surgical complications, or infections. Researchers admitted that getting a sense of ambulatory care issues is difficult because some patients who had an adverse event may not have been sick enough to require hospital care, which means their records would not show up in a study at the hospital.



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