How Safe Are Our Pediatric Emergency Departments?

Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario

Status: Completed

Conditions: Adverse Drug Event; Adverse Effects

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other; Industry

Identifiers

NCT02162147

312463 (Other Grant/Funding Number)

14/70X

Details and patient eligibility

About

Patient safety is an internationally recognized health care priority. Canadian data suggests that about 8% of adults admitted to hospital experience unintended harm (or 'adverse events') from the health care provided during their hospital stay. On a national level, this represents almost 25,000 preventable deaths among hospitalized adults each year. The emergency department is recognized as a high-risk environment for adverse events but most patient safety research is not specific to the emergency department. As well, the vast majority of people treated in the emergency department are sent home after their visit; yet safety research focuses primarily on people who are admitted to hospital. Finally, although children have also been identified as particularly high risk for suffering adverse events, very little research has been done on how often these events occur among children who visit the emergency department. Our study will address this gap in our knowledge about patient safety and provide important information on the frequency, severity and preventability of adverse events occurring among children in the emergency department. This information will help us to improve the safety of emergency department care for all Canadian children.

Enrollment: 6,385 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 1 day to 18 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Age less than 18 years
• Patients from all pediatric Canadian Triage Acuity Scale categories (pedsCTAS; 1:resuscitation; 2:emergent, 3:urgent, 4:semi-urgent, 5:non-urgent).

Exclusion criteria

• Insurmountable language barrier that prevents informed consent and follow-up by telephone.
• Children and families that will be unavailable for telephone follow-up in the three weeks after their emergency department visit (e.g., no telephone in the home, travelling out of the country, etc.).