Patient safety

Abstract

Patient safety is currently a subject of great importance in healthcare, especially for hospitals, given the greater complexity of care provided by them. Adverse events related to health care are responsible for a high number of deaths or for additional days of hospitalization or not planned treatments. The present study aims at evaluating patient safety at hospitals of the State of São Paulo, more precisely general and specialized hospitals. A questionnaire addressing various aspects related to quality and patient safety will be used. The questions include main characteristics of the hospital, committees related to quality of care and patient safety, scope and details concerning the quality initiative, available structure of the quality program, existence of strategies aiming at increasing patient safety, training and development, use of external evaluation models such as accreditation, availability and use of hospital indicators, and perceptions of respondents on the quality and safety at the hospital. This questionnaire will also help to identify the existence of organizational structures focused on quality and patient safety and this will also allow us to assess the dissemination of practices reinforcing patient safety at the hospitals of the sample. Hospitals of different sizes and with or without quality programs will take part in this study. This study will help to identify different types of organizations according to their involvement with quality, facilitating thus the proposition of strategies that may foster patient safety at hospitals in São Paulo. (AU)