Article contributed by: Emily Newhook, Community Relations Manager for MHA@GW at The Milken Institute School of Public Health at The George Washington University

Defining Adverse Medical Events

Mistakes can happen anywhere, but when it comes to fields like health care – where errors can have life-threatening consequences – we hold people to a higher standard. An adverse medical event (AME) is one such example. An AME — the result of a medical intervention rather than the underlying medical condition — is unintentional harm that can cause serious injury to a patient. AMEs run the gamut of medical problems and include hospital-acquired infections, catheter-acquired infections, surgeries done on the wrong patients or wrong area, leaving foreign bodies inside a patient after procedures, hospital falls and slips, incorrect medication and pressure ulcers among others. Read more

In the months prior to the publication of this article on 5/14/2014, several states enacted legislation that will give Nurse Practitioners greater or full independence to practice primary care medicine. These legislative measures have been hotly debated and the issues at play are quite complex. It appears that given the nation’s healthcare trajectory we may be in an era of punctuated equilibrium regarding the scope of practice for Nurse Practitioners. Read more