Adverse events in professional practice of nurses working in anaesthetic and intensive care units

The main goal of modern health protection systems is to provide such a high quality level of medical services including patients' safety. Because of their specific both anaesthetics and intensive care medicine increase the risk of many dangers, especially adverse events. Analysis of adverse events occurrence during nurses’ work experience, focusing on nurses who work in intensive care or anaesthetics. Recognition of adverse events' incidence and reasons. Research was done on 83 nurses working in intensive care and anaesthetics; the majority of them were women (approx 96.4%). An average age of examined ones was 35.6 years (SD = 8.2). Researchers used authorial questionnaire that had been based on literature analysis and research instrument: Hospital Survey on Patient Safety Culture. 32.5% of examined persons declared occurrence of an adverse event during doing a professional activity. Prominent plurality of them said as well that the number of nurses in employment was insufficient (p = 0.018) or work at night hours caused the risk of adverse events (p = 0.022). Among persons who declared occurrence of an adverse event 51.9% had not reported this fact to their supervisors. An adverse event that happened the most often was accidental removal of either endotracheal or feeding tube (68.7%). The following conclusions were made: 1. Every third respondent declared occurrence of an adverse event during performing work. 2. Prominent majority of examined persons found reporting adverse events as a duty of every worker but only every other of those who declared occurrence of an adverse event notified a supervisor about it. 3. The incidence of adverse events depended on the respondents' opinion about working conditions. Sociodemographic aspects did not influence the incidence of mistakes.