http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/hse/hse-71-10776/hse-71-10776-c04.pdf
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Adverse events are defined as incidents in which harm resulted to a person receiving health care. They include infections, falls resulting in injuries, and medication and medical device problems. Some of these adverse events may be preventable. Separations with adverse events are included within the Safety dimension of the revised National Health Performance Framework.
The separations data include ICD-10-AM diagnoses, places of occurrence, and external causes of injury and poisoning which indicate that an adverse event was treated and may have occurred during the hospitalisation.
However, other ICD-10-AM codes may also indicate that an adverse event occurred or was treated, and some adverse events are not identifiable using these codes. The data presented in Table 4.13 can therefore be interpreted as representing selected adverse events in health care that have resulted in, or have affected, hospital admissions, rather than all adverse events that occurred in hospitals.
In 2007–08, there were 382,000 separations with an ICD-10-AM code for an adverse event (4.8 per 100 separations) (Table 4.13). There were 268,000 separations with adverse events in the public sector (5.6 per 100 separations) and 115,000 separations in the private sector (3.7 per 100 separations). However, the data for public hospitals are not comparable with the data for private hospitals because their casemixes differ and recording practices may be different.
