Abstract

MARTIN, M.C.  and  RUIZ, J.. Adverse events in Intensive Medicine: Managing risk. Med. Intensiva [online]. 2006, vol.30, n.6, pp.284-292. ISSN 0210-5691.

Health care interventions entail a risk of adverse events (AE), that may cause lesions, incapacities and even death in the patients. Given the complexity of the care of the critical patient, the Critical Care Services are a high risk setting for the appearance of AE in these patients, many of them avoidable. Several studies show the influence of organizational factors focused on the system in the reduction of care risk and on the result of the critical patients. The voluntary and anonymous registry and reporting systems make it possible to identify a significant percentage of these incidents, analyze the factors related (that contribute or limit), establish preventive strategies, permitting management of risk, and potentially reduce the appearance and consequences of avoidable AE with all this. Initiatives such as the ICU Safety Reporting System (ICUSRS), that use a web database as registry system and includes contributions from different sites, favor the safety and risk culture, essential in the improvement of health quality of critical patients.

Keywords : medical errors; adverse events; safety; risk management.