Overview of medical errors and adverse events

During the past decade, healthcare quality and patient safety have emerged as major targets for improvement. Widely publicized reports from the United States, such as Crossing the Quality Chasm [1] and To Err is Human [2], showed that medical errors were common and adversely affected patient outcomes. These publications made the general public acutely aware of the inadequacies in the health care available to them. They also prompted healthcare providers, governments, and medical societies throughout the world to develop tools for measuring healthcare quality in all the fields of medicine. Institutions promoting error reporting were set up in Australia [3] and the United States [4] in 2000, in the United Kingdom in 2003 [5], and in France in 2006 [6].The concept of quality has evolved from a process grounded in the physician-patient relationship to broader approaches involving the healthcare community, concept of efficiency, and ethical access to care. When discussing quality of care, it should be borne in mind that safety is a global concept encompassing efficiency, security of care, reactivity of caregivers, and satisfaction of patients and relatives. Starting in the 19th century, several landmark events laid the foundation for the development of quality of care. During the Crimean war in the 1850s, Florence Nightingale studied mortality rates in military hospitals. In 1912, Ernest Codman developed a method to measure the outcomes of surgical interventions. In 1918, the American College of Surgery defined the minimum standard that hospitals needed to fulfil to obtain accreditation. In 1950, the medical audit method was developed by P. Lembcke in the United States and 1 year later the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) was created to accredit those hospitals that applied standard quality measures. In 1970, J. Williamson introduced a new method for assessing what is achievable but not achieved by the standard of care to what is actually done, via p