Our Position on Serious Adverse Events

The North Shore-LIJ Health System is committed to providing safe, high quality healthcare. Yet despite our best efforts to continuously improve, preventable adverse events, though rare, do occur. When they do, we commit to open disclosure and apologize to the patient and family. We further commit to conduct a thorough quality assurance review to determine how we can improve and prevent a recurrence. This is standard practice, but we want to do better. We have therefore adopted a position to waive charges to patients for the costs of care associated with a defined list of preventable adverse event.

These events include the following:
 

• surgery performed on the wrong body part
• surgery performed on the wrong patient
• wrong surgical procedure performed on a patient
• unintended retention of a foreign object in a patient after surgery or other procedure
• patient death or serious disability associated with intravascular air embolism
• patient death or serious disability associated with a medication error
• patient death or serious disability associated with a hemolytic reaction due to the administration of ABO/HLA-incompatible blood or blood products
• artificial insemination with the wrong donor sperm or wrong egg

We will adapt our position on these incidents as the healthcare community addresses the issue of adverse events and commit to putting our patients first when considering how to respond.