ABSTRACT
The field of patient safety has slowly been expanding, but has really become prominent since the release of the sentinel report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (Kohn, Corrigan, and Donaldson, 2000), which put focus on the fact that there are adverse events that occur in hospitals resulting in patient harm and death. Unfortunately, these adverse events have been found in many cases to be directly attributable to the hospital system and not the patient’s underlying medical condition. Dr Charles Vincent is one of the pioneers in the field of patient safety research, as he started looking into medical accidents as early as 1989 (Vincent, 1989). His work has evolved and expanded over time, with a focus on medical accidents early in his career (Ennis and Vincent, 1990), to looking at the patient’s experience after a medical accident (Vincent, Pincus, and Scurr, 1993; Vincent, Martin, and Ennis, 1991). This research lead Dr Vincent to then start looking at the impact of harm on both the patient harmed and staff involved (Vincent, 2006; Vincent, 1995). The body of work by Dr Vincent also includes the investigation of incident review (Taylor-Adams and Vincent, 2004; Vincent, 2000; Vincent, Taylor-Adams, and Stanhope, 1998), as well as incident reporting (Vincent, 2007; Stanhope, CrowleyMurphy, Vincent, O’Connor, and Taylor-Adams, 1999). This extensive work has culminated in a book he wrote, Patient Safety (2010), which is an introduction to patient safety and a must read for anyone new to this field. The book transports the reader through the evolution of this field, highlighting the current landscape of patient harm, as well as how these harms reach the patient. The book further discusses the impact of harm to both patient and staff, and identifies methods used to detect and improve patient safety errors in healthcare.
