Global Trends in Medical Error Reporting in Veterinary Medicine

Presentation Description / Summary: The field of patient safety is in its infancy in veterinary medicine, and we are just now beginning to explore the types of patient safety events, medical errors, ‘near misses,’ and adverse events that occur within our field. In this presentation, we will discuss retrospectively identified trends from 64,404 patient safety events that were collected over a two-year period from over 2200 veterinary facilities globally. Analyzed metrics include type or category of patient safety event, patient species, patient outcome and veterinary facility type (primary care or specialty/emergency facility). This information can be used to thematically identify areas of focus for future patient safety improvement in veterinary medicine. We will also compare our findings to general patient safety trends in human healthcare and discuss current literature. With veterinary patient safety its early development, now is the time to learn from the successes – and the pitfalls – of human healthcare when it comes to patient safety.