Emergency Department Clinical Risk

Abstract

The emergency department of any institution is an entry point for a significant number of patients to any health care organization. The department caters to various trauma and medical emergencies in both adults and in children round the clock and is adequately staffed with emergency physicians, and nursing to handle such emergencies at all times and days. The department also oversees operations of the prehospital emergency medical services (ambulance) and coordinates their services. The emergency department (ED) is considered particularly high risk for adverse events (AE): 60% of ED patients experienced Medication Error (Patanwala et al., Ann Emerg Med 55:522–526, 2010). From a systematically review about AE related to ED, appears that the prevalence of AE among hospitalized patients ranging from 2.9% to 16.6%, with 36.9% to 51% of events considered preventable (Stang et al., PLoS One 8:e74214, 2013). Maintaining quality and developing error-free systems have been the focus of engineering over the last few decades. Consider the degree of variability of every individual human being compared to machine and also wisdoms from engineering field, for error-free system that guarantees good quality assistance should be defined a program reasonably simple, locally relevant, easily implementable, not be resource intense and have tangible outcomes which can be measured.