Patient Safety and Risk Management in Medicine: From Theory to Practice

Medical errors can have serious consequences, often resulting in harm to patients or even death. In the last decades the issue of the 2nd victim was raised, emphasizing the impact of being involved in an adverse event on the ability of caregivers to provide high quality and safe treatment. In 1999, the American Institute of Medicine (IOM) declared that rather than assigning blame for these errors, professional investigations should be carried out to identify what caused them and prevent similar events from reoccurring in the future focusing on systemic factors. It is estimated that in the US alone, there are between 250,000 to 400,000 preventable deaths annually due to medical errors, costing over 15 billion dollars per year.