**Author details**

**6. Clinical vignette**

26 Vignettes in Patient Safety - Volume 3

**7. Conclusion**

or independent from each other.

**Acknowledgements**

**Competing interests**

CCU Coronary Care Unit

EU European Union ICU intensive care unit

IOM Institute of Medicine

ED Emergency Department

**Abbreviations**

Eighty-year-old Denisa Conolly used to wake up during the night with symptoms of dyspnea and wheezing. Her physician diagnosed her with asthma and prescribed albuterol, an asthma bronchodilator. Two days later, Mrs. Conolly was admitted to the hospital at the Coronary Care Unit (CCU) suffering from a heart attack. In his letter to the Head of Medical Services, the cardiologist reported that a diagnostic error had been realized by Mrs. Conolly's physician regarding the abnormal congestive heart failure and had administered treatment for asthma.

There is an urgent need to develop a commonly accepted definition of the "medical error" among the scientific community, which will contribute to further research regarding "error phenomena" in healthcare, facilitating data collection, synthesis, and analysis, avoiding the usage of terms with a similar meaning. Furthermore, it will contribute to a better quality control of the offered healthcare services and will also serve legal and insurance purposes. As every "human error," "medical errors" do not constitute unpredictable situations but the outcome of aggregated risk factors. The analysis of errors allows early identification and change of the conditions that favor such errors. The causes of errors in healthcare are not unambiguous

The cardiologist reported that treatment might have accelerated the heart attack.

The authors did not receive any dedicated funding for the specific manuscript.

The authors affirm that they have no competing interests.

Vasiliki Kapaki1 \* and Kyriakos Souliotis2

\*Address all correspondence to: vkapaki2005@gmail.com

1 Health Policy Institute, Athens, Greece

2 Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Peloponnese, Corinth, Greece
