Introduction:

Adverse events can cause harm to the patient, but they also affect health professionals making them second victims of the event. Interventions have been focused mostly on patients, but little on professionals, probably due to lack of tools.

Objective:

To estimate the prevalence of adverse events and describe their manifestations in healthcare personnel to evidence the phenomenon of second victims in a highly complex hospital.

Materials and methods:

We conducted an analytical cross-sectional study by a survey of 419 healthcare professionals from the hospitalization, emergency, and surgical areas in a highly complex hospital in Medellín in 2019. The frequency of adverse events was estimated and its association with some labor and demographic variables was determined.

Results:

We found that 93.1% of the participants knew of incident cases and 79% of serious adverse events while 44.4% had been involved in them and 99% of these had feelings as a second victim, mainly the difficulty to concentrate, guilt, fatigue, anxiety, and doubts about decisions; 95% indicated they wanted to receive training to face the consequences of adverse events and know how to inform the patient.

Conclusions:

Health professionals are frequently exposed to adverse events that can cause negative emotions in them such as guilt, fatigue, anxiety, and insecurity. Most professionals who participate in an adverse event express feelings as a second victim. Informing the patient about an adverse event requires preparation and most professionals requested training on the subject.

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