Patient safety initiatives turn focus toward primary care

For the first time, a patient safety conference looks at the office setting.

By Andis Robeznieks, AMNews staff. Oct. 6, 2003.

Most attention from the patient safety movement has been on hospital-based settings. Now some researchers believe it's time to take a giant step forward and investigate interventions that would improve safety in the primary care physician's office.

"I think the next step is all of us moving into the next level of research: interventions," said Nancy C. Elder, MD, an assistant professor with the University of Cincinnati Dept. of Family Medicine. "That's where we need to go. I was recently asked to give a talk on evidenced-based interventions, but I couldn't do it because there isn't enough evidence."

Dr. Elder and about 100 other physicians, pharmacists, administrators and engineers were in Chicago recently for a conference focusing on patient safety in the primary care setting. The conference was reportedly the first of its kind and was sponsored by the Primary Care Organizations Consortium, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the Dept. of Family Medicine at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. It was funded by a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Common errors that were discussed included mixing test results of patients with the same name, diagnostic errors, laboratory test and x-ray foul-ups (one presenter told of a courier putting a pile of x-rays on top of his car and then driving off), administrative errors, knowledge and skill errors, and the different definitions of patient harm.

Dr. Elder said the type of research discussed at the forum was so new, very little has been published, and that made a conference of this type all the more necessary.