Adverse Drug Events

Medications (medicines) are an important part of treating illnesses. An adverse drug event (ADE) is when a medicine or drug harms someone. This happens when there is an error with how the medication is ordered, prepared or given to a patient. At Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, we work to prevent ADEs that cause harm to patients.

How Do We Prevent Adverse Drug Events?

At CHLA, we have many processes in place to help prevent ADEs. Our teams:

  • Review all ADEs to find trends and ways to improve medication safety
  • Look at how we prepare and give medications
  • Use technology to reduce errors (such as scanning bar codes to make sure the medication ordered matches the medication given)
  • Participate in Solutions for Patient Safety, a group of children’s hospitals that learns from and teaches each other how to reduce ADEs

How Are We Doing?

Our team is dedicated to making sure that we provide medications in a safe manner. We keep track of how we are doing with the number of ADEs we have throughout the year. The graph below shows our ADE rate, which means the number of high-severity adverse drug events we observed for every 1000 days that patients were hospitalized at CHLA.

A line graph detailing biannual adverse drug event rates at CHLA. For every 1,000 days that patients were hospitalized at CHLA, high-severity adverse drug events were observed 0.25 times in Q1-Q2 of 2023; 0.31 times in Q3-Q4 of 2023; and 0.17 times in Q1-Q2 of 2024.

What You Can Do to Help

Patients and families are an important part of the care team. They play a role in lowering the risk of ADEs.  Here are some ways that you help to improve medication safety at the hospital:

  • Tell your child’s doctor about all medications they are taking.
  • Tell the care team if your child is allergic to any medications.
  • Speak up if you have any concerns about the medications your child is given.