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Patient safety incidents involving sick children in primary care in England and Wales: a mixed methods analysis

Rees, Philippa, Edwards, Adrian ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6228-4446, Powell, Colin, Hibbert, Peter, Williams, Huw, Makeham, Meredith, Carter, Ben, Luff, Donna, Parry, Gareth, Avery, Anthony, Sheikh, Aziz, Donaldson, Liam and Carson-Stevens, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7580-7699 2017. Patient safety incidents involving sick children in primary care in England and Wales: a mixed methods analysis. Plos Medicine 14 (1) , e1002217. 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002217

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Abstract

Background The UK performs poorly relative to other economically developed countries on numerous indicators of care quality for children. The contribution of iatrogenic harm to these outcomes is unclear. As primary care is the first point of healthcare contact for most children, we sought to investigate the safety of care provided to children in this setting. Methods and Findings We undertook a mixed methods investigation of reports of primary care patient safety incidents involving sick children from England and Wales’ National Reporting and Learning System between 1 January 2005 and 1 December 2013. Two reviewers independently selected relevant incident reports meeting prespecified criteria, and then descriptively analyzed these reports to identify the most frequent and harmful incident types. This was followed by an in-depth thematic analysis of a purposive sample of reports to understand the reasons underpinning incidents. Key candidate areas for strengthening primary care provision and reducing the risks of systems failures were then identified through multidisciplinary discussions. Of 2,191 safety incidents identified from 2,178 reports, 30% (n = 658) were harmful, including 12 deaths and 41 cases of severe harm. The children involved in these incidents had respiratory conditions (n = 387; 18%), injuries (n = 289; 13%), nonspecific signs and symptoms, e.g., fever (n = 281; 13%), and gastrointestinal or genitourinary conditions (n = 268; 12%), among others. Priority areas for improvement included safer systems for medication provision in community pharmacies; triage processes to enable effective and timely assessment, diagnosis, and referral of acutely sick children attending out-of-hours services; and enhanced communication for robust safety netting between professionals and parents. The main limitations of this study result from underreporting of safety incidents and variable data quality. Our findings therefore require further exploration in longitudinal studies utilizing case review methods. Conclusions This study highlights opportunities to reduce iatrogenic harm and avoidable child deaths. Globally, healthcare systems with primary-care-led models of delivery must now examine their existing practices to determine the prevalence and burden of these priority safety issues, and utilize improvement methods to achieve sustainable improvements in care quality.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Medicine
Subjects: R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Additional Information: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Publisher: Public Library of Science
ISSN: 1549-1277
Funders: NIHR HS&DR
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 24 January 2017
Date of Acceptance: 8 December 2016
Last Modified: 10 Jun 2023 22:46
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/97727

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