Patient safety and International Patient Safety Goals (IPSGs) in the field of respirology

Patients may be harmed despite receiving perfect care (i.e., from an accepted complication of surgery or aside effect of medication), it is important to separate adverse events from errors. Patient safety literature commonly defines an error as “an act or omission that leads to an unanticipated, undesirable outcome or to substantial potential for such an outcome.” Adverse events, in contrast, are injuries due to medical management rather than the patient’s underlying illness is distinction is crucial. For example, when a patient who was appropriately prescribed warfarin for chronic atrial fibrillation develops a gastrointestinal bleed despite a therapeutic international normalized ratio, an adverse event, not a medical error, has occurred. Conversel, if the international normalized ratio was supratherapeutic because the physician prescribed a new medication without checking for possible drug interactions, a medical error would have occurred.