Adverse events in British hospitals: preliminary retrospective record review

Two errors persisted to publication in this article by Charles Vincent and colleagues (3 March, pp 517-8). The first column heading in table 2 should read “No of adverse events” [not “No of patients with adverse events”], and the penultimate sentence in the second paragraph of the results section should read: “Overall, 57 [not 53] (48%) adverse events were judged preventable.” It should also have been made clear that some of the authors' results had already been published earlier in the BMJ (1999;319:1091); in Organisation With a Memory (a report by an expert group, chaired by the chief medical officer for England, Liam Donaldson, on learning from adverse events in the NHS); and in Clinical Governance Bulletin.