Patient safety on the press in Italy, a preliminary investigation of the terms and trend

Introduction: Patient safety is a public concern. In Italy, the wide majority of the citizens (97%) reported that medical errors are an important problem (Eurobarometer 241, 2006), but the proportion of those who reported to have suffered an adverse event (15%) is much below the EU average of 26% (Eurobarometer 327, 2010). Then we decided to systematically analyse the terms used on the press to report patient safety incidents and to look at eventual correlations between the trend of terms, catastrophic events occurred, regulations and practices to reduce risks. Methods: We used a dedicated software developed for collecting, storing and analyzing all health news. Quantitative and qualitative analysis were conducted on the DB of articles published from 1999 to 2012 in the three main Italian newspapers, applying a set of 6 terms of common and technical language to refer to patient safety incidents. Also, we reviewed the national regulations and the database of adverse events collected since 2006. Results: On a total of 38.265 articles on health topics, 0,5% refer to patient safety incidents. The most frequent word used is "malpractice" (59,4%), followed by "adverse reaction" (17,5%) and "adverse event" (10,5%). Peaks are in 2007 (17,1%), 2010 (14,6%) and 2008 (12,2%), whit no clear trend neither for the aggragated data nor for the individual terms used. Peaks seem to be attributable to the media coverage of individual catastrophic event, such as the transplantation of three organs from an HIV-positive donor and the death of a woman following an unecessary surgery due to a mis-identification of the CT-scan (2007), the death of three babies during delivery within three weeks at the same hospital (2008). In 2010 the peak correspond to the publication of the national enquiry on malpractice at the Parliament. Discussion: Patient safety incidents are not very popular on health news. Despite the effort made to develop regulations and practices for patient safety and for public disclosure of incidents, the peaks seem to be related to individual catastrophic events and malpractice issues. Further investigation is needed to understand the influence of the press on clinical risk perception and improve the information on patient safety.