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The following is issued on behalf of the Hospital Authority:
The Hospital Authority today (July 31) published two regular publications to promote risk management among healthcare professionals in public hospitals - the "HA Risk Alert" and the "Medication Incident Reporting Programme" (MIRP) Bulletin.
The Hospital Authority implemented a Sentinel Event Policy in October 2007 as a risk management and communication initiative to further strengthen the reporting and monitoring of adverse incidents in public hospitals.
Important lessons of patient safety identified from the root cause analyses during incident investigation will be collated and shared among healthcare professionals in the bi-monthly publication "HA Risk Alert".
The latest issue of "HA Risk Alert" features a number of cases of retained medical device, instrument or gauze in patients during surgical or interventional procedures. Subsequent to in-depth root cause analyses of incident investigation, recommendations are made and shared in this publication to avoid similar events in future.
With a particular focus on medication issues, the MIRP was first established in 1994 as a continuous quality improvement initiative through regular case sharing and statistical analysis of reported incidents. In this latest issue, the bulletin highlighted three cases for sharing with recommendations to prevent recurrence of incidents of similar nature. The MIRP bulletin is published every six months.
Both risk management publications have been distributed to the healthcare professionals in public hospitals for continuous quality improvement purpose and can be accessed by the public on www.ha.org.hk/riskalert and www.ha.org.hk/ho/mirp .
Ends/Friday, July 31, 2009
Issued at HKT 17:41
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