This week’ Research Review discusses a very important topic – patient safety, and what our profession is doing about investigating and reporting adverse events associated with chiropractic and physiotherapy treatments (from the SafetyNet Active Surveillance Reporting System).
I think this is a very important topic, so I have made this Research Review available to non-subscribers for free: GET IT HERE
Monitoring adverse events (AEs) can improve patient safety by identifying risks and preventable injuries. It can also provide patients with more accurate safety profiles for treatments, contributing to more appropriate expectations, and improving informed decision making about treatment options. Doing this sort of work can be logistically complex, as there are generally multiple potential causes of reported incidents, it is rare to have enough information to assess causation, and there may be poor understanding of the underlying mechanism of injury/disease process.
The investigation of AEs in community-based healthcare systems in still in its infancy. This is due to the lack of reporting systems to accurately collect information on AEs, heterogeneity in AE definitions, long periods between visits, and coordination of care involving multiple providers. For practitioners providing spinal manipulation (SMT) in community-based settings there is the added complexity of the natural history of presenting musculoskeletal (MSK) complaints.
The SafetyNet research program was developed by a large international, multidisciplinary research team with expertise in chiropractic, physiotherapy, relevant medical specialties, research methodology, and patient safety, to help overcome the absence of high-quality prospective data on the frequency of AEs following SMT. The program was developed with the aim of creating and implementing an active surveillance reporting system to allow AEs to be reported to a central location and anonymously assessed. The primary aim of this study was to use the SafetyNet Active Surveillance Reporting System to report the incidence of AEs in patients after treatment with chiropractors and physiotherapists.
From Dr. Thistle:
Studying patient safety is so important for the chiropractic profession. The choice seems simple – either we study it, produce good data and publish it for everyone to see, or let others drive the narrative. I commend this research team, led by my friends and colleagues Drs. Katie Polhman, Martha Funabashi, David Cassidy, Greg Kawchuk, Sir Mior and others…
RESEARCH REVIEW: Incidence of Adverse Events Related to Chiropractic & Physiotherapy Treatment
This paper was published in PLoS ONE (2024).
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