British hospitals under-report errors

When hospitals make mistakes – even when those errors cause serious injury or death -- they often don’t report them in their routine data.  That practice should stop, stated researchers writing in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

About 850,000 medical errors occur in Britain’s National Health System (NHS) hospitals every year, resulting in 40,000 deaths.

Researchers looked at four years of English hospital statistics to examine patterns in the recording of adverse events and ask whether this routinely collected source of data could be of use in monitoring this problem.

They found, on average, 2.2% of all episodes (about 27,500 per year) included a code for an adverse event. Misadventures were mentioned in 0.03% of episodes (nearly 4,000 per year). Events were more likely to occur in men, in elderly people, and in emergency admissions.

Adverse events using routine data may be under-recorded, the authors stated. For statistics to accurately monitor adverse events, hospitals should be encouraged to improve the recording of events on their systems, they concluded.

Source: “How often are adverse events reported in English hospital statistics?” by  Paul Aylin, Shivani Tanna, Alex Bottle, Brian Jarman, BMJ, Aug. 14, 2004