Quality and safety in a children’s hospital

Abstract

Patients and parents expect safe and high quality care when entering a children’s hospital. However, pediatric care is confronted with unique challenges to safety, and errors are more common than we like to admit. Pediatric care is complicated by the differences in patient size and weight, requiring different medication doses, different sized devices with the potential for technical difficulties because of smaller sizes, such as insertion of intravenous catheter. Although great progress has been made to avoid errors in some institutions, there is still much more to be done. This chapter discusses some of the approaches and preliminary achievements in creating a patient safety program.