Report from a national medical record review using the Global Trigger Tool
Report
|Updated
This report describes how medical record review with Global Trigger Tool has been conducted nationally under the auspices of the national patient safety campaign.
Key message
On the 27th of January 2011 the Norwegian Health minister launched the national patient safety campaign, “In Safe Hands”. The aims of the campaign are to reduce harmful events to patients, establish competence and routines for patient safety and improve patient safety culture. The Health minister mandated that all Norwegian healthcare trusts should review randomly selected medical records from hospital admissions throughout the campaign to track local and national improvement. In order to create a national baseline for the measurement of adverse events, medical record review was required done for patients discharged after the 1st of March 2010 and throughout the year.
This report describes how medical record review with Global Trigger Tool has been conducted nationally under the auspices of the national patient safety campaign. 18 out of 19 trusts and five private hospitals submitted results. A total of 39 GTT teams reviewed the medical records from minimum 200 randomly selected hospital admissions of patients that had been discharged between March 1st and December 31st of 2010. Records of 7819 admissions were reviewed.
- 16 percent of the hospital admissions included at least one adverse event (min 3,5 % – max 38 %).
- 7 percent of the hospital admissions included at least one adverse event that led to prolonged hospitalization (min 2 % – max 18 %).
- 1 percent of the hospital admissions included at least one adverse event that gave the patient permanent harm (min 0 % – max 3 %).
- 0, 66 % of the hospital admissions involved patient harm that led to death (min 0% – max 2 %).
- A total of 8,9 percent of the admissions involved an adverse event that led to prolonged hospitalization or more serious consequences (F to I categories) (min 2,5 % – max 21 %).