The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety
Adverse Events During Hospitalization: Results of a Patient Survey
Section snippets
Sampling
The goal was to interview a sample of patients 18 years of age or older who were hospitalized for medical or surgical treatment (psychiatric and obstetrical admissions were excluded) and who were discharged from Massachusetts hospitals between April 1 and October 1, 2003.
We drew a two-stage probability sample from the 71 general acute care hospitals in 2003 in Massachusetts. The five largest (on the basis of bed size) hospitals were selected with certainty. The remaining 66 were put into three
Data Collection
Of the initial sample of 20 hospitals, 5 had to be replaced by randomly selecting another hospital from the same stratum. In three cases, more than 1 hospital was approached before a willing replacement was found. In addition, at a point that was too late to consider replacement, 4 other hospitals withdrew, including 1 from the large hospital stratum.
The initial sample included 5,859 patients from 16 hospitals, of whom 963 were ineligible because they were deceased, were living in a nursing
Discussion
The data reported in this article indicate that about one fourth of hospitalized patients report that they experienced an adverse event resulting from their care in the hospital and that three quarters of those events appeared to physician reviewers to be at least “significant” in severity. Those rates are higher than adverse event rates estimated from review of hospital records, 4., 6., 8. which range from 3% to 11%, depending on the patient population and definition of adverse events.
The
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