Key result
To Err Is Human' expands anesthesiology safety research over 20 years, shifting toward managerial topics.
Why the study?
The study was conducted to analyze the impact of the Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human on patient safety research in anesthesiology.
Over 20 years, patient safety research in anesthesiology shifted from a focus on critical incident reporting and systemic approaches to a broader, more managerial patient safety agenda.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Alerts anesthesiology researchers to a managerial shift in safety priorities; leaves open whether this advances or undermines systemic improvements.
Background: which summarized a culminated decades' worth of research that had so far been largely ignored. The aim of this study was to analyze the report's impact on patient safety research in anesthesiology. Methods: . In bibliometric literature, references are understood to represent an author's conscious decision to express a relationship between his own manuscript and the cited document. Results: The anesthesiologic data base contained 1.036 publications. The journal with the most references to the IOM report is Anesthesia & Analgesia. By analyzing author keywords and patterns of collaboration, changes in the patient safety debate and its core themes in anesthesiology over time could be visualized. The generic notion of "error," while initially a central topic in the scientific discourse, was subsequently replaced by terms representing a more granular, team-oriented, and educational approach. Patient safety research in anesthesia, while profiting from a certain intellectual and conceptual head start, showed a discursive shift toward more managerial, quality-management related topics as observed in the health care system as a whole. Conclusions: Over the last 20 years, the research context expanded from the initial focus set forth by the IOM report, which ultimately led to an underrepresentation of research on critical incident reporting and systemic approaches to safety. Important collaborations with safety researchers from outside of health care dating back to the 1990's were gradually reduced, while previous research within anesthesiology was aligned with a broader, more managerial patient safety agenda.
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Neuhaus et al. (2022) studied Patient safety in anesthesiology (n=1,036). To Err Is Human report was evaluated on Thematic evolution and publication trends. The publication of 'To Err Is Human' led to an expansion of patient safety research in anesthesiology over 20 years, ultimately shifting focus toward managerial topics and away from systemic approaches.
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