Little patients, large risks: An overview on patient safety management in pediatrics settings

Patient safety is an emerging healthcare discipline with the ultimate goal to reduce errors and harm to patients by implementing quality health services. In 1999, the well-known “To Err is Human: Building a safer health system” reported that between 2% and 4% of people die annually in United States hospitals for medical errors. Since that publication, the focus on healthcare safety has encouraged efforts by legislators, hospital government, and health professionals to promote policies and behaviors heavily to reduce errors and implement a safe provision of healthcare delivery. In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared September 17th as Patient Safety Day, confirming that as a global priority. The increasing interest in patient safety has significant repercussions on scientific publications with an ever-increasing production of studies in the growing interdisciplinary field of public health. New concepts and new terms had born, such as “clinical risk,” which refers to the probability that a patient can be the victim of an adverse event due to medical care, although unintentionally. The WHO proposed to adopt a “universal vocabulary” thus standardizing the terminology and allowing effective scientific research. In clinical risk, the most explored field is adult patient safety, where growing interest is shown primarily to prevent nosocomial infections, falls, and pressure injuries. Instead, a little-explored area concerns the pediatric population. This article aims to overview the spread of pediatric clinical risk management and organizational culture for healthcare quality improvement, looking at what has been done and enhancing healthcare practices to implement inpatient safety. The authors have reviewed the main concerns on pediatric patient safety and issued the main medico-legal aspects. After summarizing the relevant literature, the authors addressed their point of view by writing an opinion article.