Siguiendo la pista de los efectos adversos: cómo detectarlos

In this study, differences in the effectiveness of the three methods were found according to ward type; however, the overall effectiveness of the retrospective and prospective methods in identifying adverse events was similar. The role of epidemiological methods in the study of adverse events can be summarized as follows: the cross sectional method can be useful in certain circumstances; the retrospective cohort study continues to be the reference method to evaluate the incidence of adverse events; the prospective method has notable pedagogic and communicative properties and is effective in appraising chains of events and consequences, and the case-control study could be used to evaluate the impact of adverse events.