[Quality management in health care: error prevention and managing errors in medicine]

About 3.7% of in-house-treated patients in Switzerland, the USA and Australia are victims of treatment-related health problems which probably are related to avoidable "adverse events" in more than 50% of the occurrences. Reasons are primarily systematic incidents, e.g., organizational deficiencies in the health system and only secondarly individual mistakes. As there are no systematic studies available, it is not proven if those figures can be transferred to the German Health Care System. Here, experts anticipate up to 12.000 proven treatment errors per year.

Dedicated programs for identification and prevention of adverse events should be implemented--besides systematic quality improvement--to improve professional handling and prevention of adverse events. This consists of a) assessment of the existing problem using existing data bases and/or implementation of mandatory documentation and information routines as well as reporting systems, b) development of sanction-free reporting routines within the legal framework, c) dissemination of behavior-oriented training systems for recognition and prevention of adverse events as well as incentives for the participation in such training systems, d) implementation of automatic routines for prevention of adverse events (e.g., computer-based monitoring of ADE or computer-based reminder systems based on clinical guidelines).