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We should use the word “Health Care Safety” instead of “Patient Safety,” because in cases of malpractice the people who are in charge of treatment of patients can be “second victims.” The typical damage case occurs to an above-average employee in a risk-prone discipline after working in the job for 20 years often between Friday afternoon and Sunday more often in the months of January, March or July due to a preceding communication error and a missing assertiveness of a person who is involved in the case. Very often, health professionals do not know how to react in case of malpractice or emergency from a legal point of view. The patient or his family contact a lawyer immediately, but who helps the health professionals to cope with the case? The Vienna General Hospital (VGH) is one of the biggest in the world. In 1999, the project “Risk Management” was initiated by the Legal Department. The aim at this time was: “Minus 50% concerning cases and more than 50% less costs in the next ten years (2000–2010).” In 2010, the aim was reached and the positive trend is still continuing, but how did it work? The VGH in cooperation with the Vienna Insurance Group created a complete new form of quick help in case of emergency: the so-called “Legal Emergency Kit.” It represents a handy plastic case on which a paragraph is stamped. A special checklist tells what to do in case of legal emergency. The legal practitioner of the VGH can be called at any time via mobile phone. The malpractice cases are analysed in a retrospective damage analysis, which helps to avoid errors and damages in the future.

Befindet sich ein Patient in Vollnarkose, ist er nicht imstande, den behandelnden Personen uber sein sonst im Normalzustand vorhandenes Schmerzempfinden (rechtzeitig) mitzuteilen, dass seine Lagerungsposition nicht optimal ist und einer Veranderung bedarf. So geschieht es immer wieder, dass ein sich entwickelnder Lagerungsschaden nicht erkannt wird oder eventuell wahrend des Eingriffs auch gar nicht erkannt werden kann. Im Folgenden soll auf die rechtlichen Aspekte der Lagerungsschaden eingegangen werden.

In view of the high number of deaths and complication rates of major surgical procedures worldwide, surgical safety is described as a substantial global public-health concern. Naturally, patient safety has become an international priority. The increasing amount of electronically available clinical documents holds great potential for the computational analysis of large repositories. However, most of this data is in textual form and the clinical domain is a challenging field for the appliance of natural language processing. This is particularly the case if you deal with a language other than English, due to the little attention from the international research community. In this project, we are concerned with the utilization of a Germanspeaking operative report repository for the purpose of risk management and patient safety research. In this particular paper we focus on the description of our information retrieval approach. We investigated the thought process of a domain expert in order to derive his information of interest and describe a facet-based way to navigate this kind of information in the form of extracted phrases. Initial results and feedback has been very promising, but a formal evaluation is still missing.