I read with interest the article “Keeping Patients Safe During Intra-hospital Transport” (August 2010: 18–32) and I appreciated the extensive literature review carried out by the author. I have some concerns about the absence in the article of mortality data related to in-hospital transportation. Beckmann et al1  analyzed data from the Australian Incident Monitoring Study in Intensive Care (AIMS-ICU) and found a mortality rate of 2% among 176 anonymous incident reports related to patients’ transportation. In my opinion, the number of deaths caused by in-hospital transfer is underestimated in the literature, and anecdotal events of this kind are widespread among critical care health care workers. Perhaps reliable information about this important issue should be collected by totally anonymous incident reporting systems such as the AIMS-ICU.

Also, I would like to integrate the interesting review in this article with data from an old but important observational study about mishaps during...

You do not currently have access to this content.