BMJ 2002;324:584-587 ( 9 March )

Primary care

Enhancing public safety in primary care

Tim Wilson, director ^a, Aziz Sheikh, NHS R&D national primary care training fellow ^b. 

^a RCGP Quality Unit, 14 Princes Gate, London SW7 1PU, ^b Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London SW7 2AZ

Correspondence: T Wilson twilson@rcgp.org.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Improving the safety record of the NHS is a national priority. This is not surprising, as recent research shows that up to 850 000 adverse events occur in hospitals every year.¹ Up to 90 000 iatrogenic deaths may occur each year in hospitals in the United States,² and the picture is likely to be similar in the United Kingdom. The landmark report To Err is Human has led to substantial investment in the US Agency for Health Research and Quality's safety unit.² This was closely followed in the United Kingdom by the Department of Health reports An Organisation with a Memory and Building a Safer NHS, heralding the introduction of the National Patient Safety Agency. ^{3 4} Our understanding of the causes of iatrogenic adverse events in secondary care has increased substantially over the past decade, but the same cannot be claimed of primary care.

In this paper, we consider public safety in primary . . . [Full text of this article]

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