WHO's Patient Safety Programme  recently released the results of the first multi-country study on hospital adverse events, conducted in the Eastern Mediterranean and African Regions of WHO.  The results show that

• almost a third of patients impacted by harmful incidents died, 14% sustained permanent disability and 16% sustained moderate disability.
• 4 out of 5 incidents were preventable.
• 34% of observed incidents resulted from therapeutic errors, 19% from misdiagnosis and 18% were related to surgery.
• the major causes of the harmful incidents observed were related to the training and supervision of clinical staff, the availability and implementation of protocols and policies, and communication and reporting.

The Adverse Events Study carried out in 26 hospitals from two African countries: Kenya and South Africa and six Eastern Mediterranean countries: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia and Yemen used a collaborative model with the objective of measuring harmful events occurring in these hospitals.

It is the first large scale study which attempts to measure patient harm in hospitals in these regions and the results show that patient safety concerns are as important in these regions as had been previously recognized in more economically developed ones.