Patient safety

The concept of patient safety describes the result of a fault - and damage-free medical treatment and medical care.

Patient safety is the product of all measures in the doctor's offices to keep the clinics and other health care facilities that are aimed at patients from avoidable damages in connection with the treatment. Patient safety is an important component of quality assurance in medicine.

Patient safety in the hospital

According to § 135a paragraph 2 no 2 SGB V hospitals in Germany are obliged to set up a device internal quality and patient-centered complaints management. Here are the documentation, testing and evaluation of patient complaints and mishandling events, according to their analysis using the determinative language regime of the German Medical Association ascending classification as near- damage or near- error, adverse event, preventable adverse event, critical event and error can take place, the more complex evolving by the medical and scientific progress human clinical processes more transparent and thus more didactic, so as to achieve a sound improve patient safety.

The German Advisory Council on the Assessment of Developments in the Health Care put 2007 in front of an analysis of 184 studies. This evaluation resulted in an annual frequency of 5 to 10% of adverse events, 2 to 4% damage, 1% and 0.1% treatment failure deaths, which go back to error for the hospital. With 17 million annual hospital patients, this corresponds to undesired 850,000 to 1.7 Mio events, 340,000 damage, 170,000 medical errors and preventable adverse events attributable to 17,000 deaths.

The Advisory Council speaks of a conservative approximation to the number of possible adverse events, which can be interpreted as a preliminary reduction of preventable adverse events. The outpatient area was not included in the evaluation.

Quality reports of hospitals

Since 2005, hospitals are gem in Germany. § 137a Section 2 No. 4 SGB V required by law to publish structured quality reports regularly. The reports serve the patients, doctors and the health information and transparency in the field of hospital treatment and provide a comprehensive overview of the structures, services and quality activities of hospitals.

The Federal Joint Committee (G -BA) decides on the content, scope and data format of these reports.

Reference database

The Federal Joint Committee (G -BA) has a reference database, in which the machine recyclable quality reports of German hospitals are available.

Security Checklist of the World Health Organization

With the issues of security checklist of the World Health Organization are only 19 seem to have been clarified points before induction of anesthesia, are before the patient leaves the operating room, checked before the first cut of the surgeon and. Thus, the error rates were significantly reduced in extensive studies, in particular the endpoints of complications after surgery and mortality after surgery decreased significantly and to a clinically relevant extent.

For example, the surgeon asks the patient about his name and whether he actually - as planned - to be operated on his left knee. The surgical team meets individually with each other before, to be sure the proper engagement there. The team should be spoken before surgery about possible complications during surgery. Or the checklist requires that all medical instruments must be counted before and after the operation there. In this way it is ensured that not a swab in the patient remains - everything for granted, but none of them may be omitted from any OP.

The German Society of Surgery has its members informed early on that checklist of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives Study Group and suggested to them that they routinely always use after adaptation to the local conditions in hospitals. In the Declaration of Helsinki on patient safety in anaesthesiology also the checklist is required.