WHO guidelines for management of adverse events

No one wants adverse events in a hospital. The ideal hospital would be free of medication errors, hospital-acquired infections, patient falls, wrong surgery and free of all the complications of modern medicine.

However, the truth is that such a hospital does not exist.

The Joint Commission International statistics quote 5632 Sentinel Events (the highest level of adverse happening possible in a hospital- such as Patient Suicide, Wrong Side Surgery, Serious postoperative complications, Death due to delay in treatment, Permanent Adverse Events and the like) from Jan 1995- December 2008. Then there are other categories of adverse events such as near misses, serious adverse events etc.

The need to report these events and resolve the same by a systematic method,often using Root Cause Analysis, has been brought out in these draft guidelines by WHO on Adverse Events. The link is provided below:

WHO guidelines for management of adverse