Preventable Deaths at Acute Care Hospitals
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Date
2016
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Abstract
Background
Previous measurements of preventable death in hospital do not account for the uncertainty of preventability ratings.
Objective
To determine the proportion of deaths in hospital that a have high probability of being prevented with high quality care.
Methods
We created summaries for every death at a tertiary care hospital over 4-months. Four reviewers assigned preventability ratings to each death and latent class analysis was used to classify deaths into high and low preventability categories.
Results
There were 480 decedents with mean age of 73.9. Inter-rater reliability was poor with an intra-class correlation of 0.14. The best latent class model found that 6.2% (95% CI 0.00 – 15.2%) of deaths had a 31.0% probability of being rated more likely preventable than not by each reviewer. In contrast, 93.8% (95% CI 84.8 - 100.0%) of deaths had a 0.8% probability of being rated more likely preventable than not by each reviewer. The incidence of truly preventable deaths is less than the 6.2% that are deemed possibly preventable.
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Conclusion
Very few deaths in hospital are preventable. The low incidence of preventable deaths and low inter-rater reliability means that peer review methodology is only sensitive to large differences in preventable death rate.
Description
Keywords
Patient safety, Adverse events, mortality rates