A Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation of Patient Safety Issues in Pediatric Emergency Departments: A Pilot Study in New York State

Medical errors are an important cause of morbidity and mortality, causing
the death of between 44,000 and 98,000 patients annually in the United
States. Little is known about medical errors in pediatric patients,
especially in the emergency department (ED) setting. This project, co-funded by the New York Department of Health, evaluated incident reports and medication records in 3 PECARN sites.

Specific Aims:

To classify and disseminate information from ongoing incident report monitoring, including actual and near-miss medication errors that occurred in the emergency department (i.e. qualitative surveillance).

To monitor medication error rates using systematic sampling and review of emergency department medical records (i.e. quantitative surveillance).

Over 3,000 medical records were reviewed and one year of incident reports were evaluated for this project.