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- Page navigation anchor for RE: Capturing harm originating from outside the hospital (the impact and cost of harm arising from the private healthcare sector)RE: Capturing harm originating from outside the hospital (the impact and cost of harm arising from the private healthcare sector)
This article is an important step forward in understanding the financial as well as human impact of patient safety events in Canada. My own long term hope is to shift attention from patient safety efforts as "cost centres" to seeing the reduction of harm as "income centres". I would like to raise two issues.
One area that remains to be developed is our understanding of and methods of calculating the financial consequences experienced by the patient, family and community after an adverse event or critical incident has occurred. This is not an easy calculation and significant efforts by the Patient Safety Team at the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority more than a decade ago was a frustrating (and unsuccessful) experience. At the time we were looking at only the consequences of patients who had suffered a hip fracture as a result of a critical incident during the provision of care (both pre-hospital and in-hospital). These costs (loss of income, disruption of family and community relationships, etc.) should be included and will undoubtedly increase several fold the total costs associated with patient safety harm events.
The second issue involves identifying harm that arises from treatment provided in the private healthcare sector, whether in individual physician offices or free standing ambulatory care centres offering relatively complex same day interventions. There is good reason to believe, based on research in the US, that care provided...
Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.