Rate of Medical Errors in Affiliated Hospitals of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences

INTRODUCTION: Health care organizations are highly specialized and complex. Thus we may expect the adverse events will inevitably occur. Building a medical error reporting system to analyze the reported preventable adverse events and learn from their results can help to prevent the repeat of these events. The medical errors which were reported to the Clinical Governance’s office of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences (MazUMS) in years 2011-2012 were analyzed. METHODS AND MATERIALS: This is a descriptive retrospective study in which 18 public hospitals were participated. The instrument of data collection was checklist that was designed by the Ministry of Health of Iran. Variables were type of hospital, unit of hospital, season, severity of event and type of error. The data were analyzed with SPSS software. RESULTS: Of 317966 admissions 182 cases, about 0.06%, medical error reported of which most of the reports (%51.6) were from non- teaching hospitals. Among various units of hospital, the highest frequency of medical error was related to surgical unit (%42.3). The frequency of medical error according to the type of error was also evaluated of which the highest frequency was related to inappropriate and no care (totally 37%) and medication error 28%. We also analyzed the data with respect to the effect of the error on a patient of which the highest frequency was related to minor effect (44.5%). CONCLUSION: The results showed that a wide variety of errors. Encourage and revision of the reporting process will be result to know more data for prevention of them.