Parents notice a significant number of medical errors but their reports sometimes do not make it into the medical record, according to a recent study.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital surveyed parents, doctors, and nurses about the care of hospitalized children and looked at the medical records. They found that error rates were almost 16% higher when family reports were included, as opposed to just the clinician reports, and the rate of adverse events was almost 10% higher.
Twenty-six percent of the families reported a total of 255 incidents, with the researchers classifying 132 incidents as safety concerns, 102 as quality issues unrelated to safety, and 21 involving other problems.
The errors and adverse events reported by parents sometimes were not entered the medical record, with 49% of family-reported errors and 24% of family-reported adverse events not documented.
Hospital incident reports were even less reliable. Family-reported error rates were five times higher than hospital incident report rates, and adverse event rates were nearly three times higher than the incident report figures.
