ABSTRACT
The important issues of errors and adverse outcomes in patient care have received attention as healthcare professionals become more focused on patient safety. There is a higher incidence of errors that occurs in surgical patients than in general medical patients, as there are more opportunities for errors with the multiple steps of surgical care. The nature of errors differs slightly in trauma and elective surgery, with both, incidents can occur on a system or an individual level. Faulty risk perception is one factor that contributes to adverse surgical outcome. The surgeon must guard against a failure to understand the extent of a patient’s injuries or the risks a patient faces from underlying illness and concurrent diseases. The nature of surgical errors can best be characterized utilizing the Joint Commission standard nomenclature for the taxonomy of adverse outcomes. This framework has been adopted from Chang and categorizes errors into several root nodes.
