[Validation of an adverse event reporting system in primary care]

Patient safety is a priority issue in health systems, due to the damage costs, institutional weakening, lack of credibility, and frustration on those who committed an error that resulted in an adverse event. There is no standardized instrument for recording, reporting, and analyzing sentinel or adverse events (AE) in primary care. Our aim was to design and validate a surveillance system for recording sentinel events, adverse events and near miss incidents in primary care.

We made a review of systems for recording and reporting adverse events in primary care. Then, we proposed an instrument to record these events, and register faults in the structure and process, in primary health care units in the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social.

We showed VENCER-MF format to 35 subjects. Out of them, 100% identified a failure in care process, 90% recorded a sentinel event, 85% identified the cause of this event, 75% of them suggested some measures for avoiding the recurrence of adverse events. We used a Cronbach's alpha of 0.6, p=0.03.

The instrument VENCER-MF has a good consistency for the identification of adverse events.