Anticipating Patient Safety Events in Psychiatric Care

Although suicide prevention often dominates patient safety efforts in psychiatry and behavioral health, patients who seek such services are also prone to other kinds of adverse events. The purpose of this study was to more fully characterize the types of safety events that occur in the context of psychiatric care.

This was a retrospective study of safety events that had been reported to a hospital-based psychiatry department during a 4-year period. The authors reviewed each incident, developed new and more precise event categories, and assigned each report to a category. Events that could not be categorized were assigned to an "Other" category. The percentages of categorizable events between the new and old frameworks were compared.

A total of 366 reports were filed. In the updated framework, 324 events (89%) could be categorized compared to 225 (61%) in the original registry.

Understanding the kinds of safety events that clinicians are likely to encounter in the context of psychiatric care may help to expand patient safety efforts beyond suicide risk prevention.