Adverse events among Winnipeg home care clients

Abstract

The topic of patient safety has recently received considerable attention in Canada, the United States, and several other countries. Most studies in this area, however, focus exclusively on hospitals, with few investigating the safety of other health care sectors, such as home care. The integrating theme for this study is that no part of the health care system, including home care, is free of adverse events (AEs). Before measuring patient safety in home care, this study sought to translate hospital-centric patient safety concepts to the home care environment. A context-appropriate approach to measure AEs in home care was developed--this used chart reviews prompted by a mixed screening process--and these methods were applied to a sample of clients from the Winnipeg Health Region to describe the incidence, type, severity, cause, preventability and ameliorability of AEs in home care.