Patient safety problems in adolescent medical care

Adverse events and comparison of systematic and voluntary reporting from a paediatric intensive care unit

“…Among these, the incidence of adverse events in children ≤15 years in the Harvard Medical Practice Study was 2.7% of hospitalisations. Another study of hospitalisations in the two States of Colorado and Utah determined that 1% of all children sustained an adverse event, of which 60% were preventable,9 and the incidence among adolescents in the study was 2.74% 13. In Australia, children (0–14 years) sustain adverse events in 10.8% of admissions, causing an additional average admission duration of 4.1 days 2.…”

Are our teenagers safe … from us?

“…Finally, adolescent demographics-notably their racial/ethnic diversity, their reliance on public systems of care and financing systems, and their use of nontraditional settings-require special attention to error among subgroups of adolescents who may be particularly at risk based upon context [12]. Indeed, adolescent-specific factors were found to contribute to errors in over half (54.8%) of the described patient safety problems in Woods et al [1].…”

“…Rarely do we think about the risks adolescents face when they receive health care. In this issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, Woods and her colleagues find that adolescents may actually be at increased risk of error and harm from medical care [1]. Applying the adverse event rate found by Woods et al to the total adolescent hospitalizations in this country yields an estimate of over 2 million adverse events annually for children aged 10 to 17 years [2].…”

“…When examining hospital care, adolescents' differential epidemiology is dominated by pregnancy-related and behavioral health admissions, areas that have been less well examined by patient safety researchers. Error rates among pregnancy-related hospitalizations were examined, but behavioral-related diagnoses, which represent a substantial proportion of the hospitalizations in the second decade of life, were not included in their analyses [1,10]. Given that only 2.6% of adolescents between the ages of 15 and 17 years are hospitalized each year, there is a need to include ambulatory settings in our evaluations of patient safety in the adolescent population.…”

The Role of Pharmacists in Caring for Young People With Chronic Illness

“…In developed countries, transcending the way that health systems and medication supply are financed, the vast majority of prescriptions for medication for young people will have been reviewed, checked and/or dispensed by a pharmacist. Woods et al 1 undertook secondary analysis of adolescent data from a large medical care dataset in Colorado and Utah. Medicationrelated events were the second most frequent source of safety problems, and the highest incidence of patient safety issues occurred in the pharmacy setting.…”