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What should we report to medical error reporting systems?

¹ Professorial Research Fellow, Health Sciences Faculty, University of Otago, P O Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand
² Assistant Director, The Robert Graham Center, 1350 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036, USA

Correspondence to:
Dr S Dovey
Pharmacy School and Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, PO Box 913, Dunedin, New Zealand; sdovey@aafp.org

Keywords: medical error; definition; error reporting systems; international health

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The Netherlands is the latest country to announce the development of a national medical error reporting system.¹ Australia has had one since 1989, Denmark has one, the UK introduced theirs in 2001, Canada announced their plans in 2003, and the USA has a proliferation of error reporting systems, including several that have been going for a number of years and that have a well developed body of knowledge steering their use and development—for example, the Medical Event Reporting System for Transfusion Medicine (MERS-TM)² and the US Pharmacopeia’s MEDMARX Reporting System³. Developed western countries do therefore seem to have "bought into" the message that medical error reporting systems are a very "good thing"—although there is little evidence that Johnson’s⁴ pragmatic cautions have been well considered in setting them up.

The reporting of "medical errors"—whatever they are—is still an embryonic endeavor and, before national and international medical error . . . [Full text of this article]

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