A substantial number of “adverse events” - many of which could have been prevented - affect children in hospitals each year, according to a new study.

Dr. Donna Woods, of Northwestern University, Chicago, and colleagues used data from the Colorado and Utah Medical Practice Study to analyze the incidence and types of adverse events in children. The analysis included some 3700 hospital patients up to 20 years of age and, for comparison purposes, about 7500 adult patients between the ages of 21 and 65 years.

The team defined an adverse event as an injury caused by medical management rather than disease that led to prolonged hospitalization or disability that persisted at the time the patient left the hospital. They defined a preventable adverse event as an injury that was avoidable using currently accepted practices.

Overall, 1 of every 100 patients in the study suffered an adverse event, and 60 percent of these were preventable, the investigators report in the medical journal Pediatrics.

Preventable adverse event rates were 0.53 percent among infants, compared with 0.22 percent in children 1 to 12 years of age and 0.95 percent among adolescents 13 to 20 years of age. The figure was 1.50 percent for adults.

“Most preventable adverse events were…birth related (32.2 percent), followed by diagnostic-related (30.4 percent) and system-related preventable adverse events (27.3 percent),” Woods and colleagues write.

“To reduce the adverse events that occur in hospitalized children, research should focus on adolescent hospitalized patients, birth-related medical care, and diagnostics in pediatric medicine,” the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: Pediatrics, January 2005.