Patient safety. WHO on adverse event reporting

My main message to the readers of this document is to encourage them to understand the purpose, strengths and limitations of patient safety adverse event reporting. Data from incident reporting can be very valuable for understanding the magnitude and nature of harm resulting from healthcare activities, provided the data are carefully reviewed and conclusions are carefully drawn. Work is underway to use adverse event reporting systems for real-world learning to achieve sustainable risk reduction and improve patient safety. This can be done, and has been done, but not yet at a scale and pace comparable to some other high-risk industries. This is something we all need to strive for. I hope these technical guidelines will help move us toward a situation where we can show patients and their families how we have used this knowledge to provide safe and reliable care every time they need it," he wrote in the introduction to the report, "Adverse Event Reporting and Analysis Systems to Improve Patient Safety." - wrote Sir Liam Donaldson, Patient Safety Representative of the World Health Organization.  

It is impossible to talk about a reliably developed system of reporting adverse events without setting clear criteria for their qualification, based on the concept of quality and safety in health care. Documents prepared by WHO and translated into Polish by the Safe Patient Foundation, made available below, can prove extremely valuable in developing such criteria and thinking about them themselves. 

Full documents: 

"Adverse event reporting and analysis systems to improve patient safety". - HERE.

"Global action plan to improve patient safety". - HERE.