Medical Error: The failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or using a wrong plan to achieve an aim.
It is important to note that the Joint Commission requires each accredited organization to establish its own definition for a sentinel event to prevent, review, and respond to these occurrences.
These events are typically unrelated to the patient’s illness/underlying condition. Sentinel Event: Defined by the Joint Commission as “a patient safety event that results in death, permanent harm, or severe, temporary harm” (The Joint Commission 2017). The awareness of such error-data by health care providers and administrators would lead to the prevention of errors and the global reduction of their recurrence. Policymakers theorized that the systematic collection of medical-error data could achieve improved patient safety. The fundamental goal of this act was to increase the nation’s overall patient safety by encouraging confidential and voluntary reporting of adverse events that affected patients. Provision of assistance to the states in developing standardized methods for data collection and data collection from state reporting systems for inclusion in the patient safety database.
