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Importance: Children of parents expressing limited comfort with English (LCE) or limited English proficiency may be at increased risk of adverse events (harms due to medical care). No prior studies have examined, in a multicenter fashion, the association between language comfort or language proficiency and systematically, actively collected adverse events that include family safety reporting., Objective: To examine the association between parent LCE and adverse events in a cohort of hospitalized children., Design, Setting, and Participants: This multicenter prospective cohort study was conducted from December 2014 to January 2017, concurrent with data collection from the Patient and Family Centered I-PASS Study, a clinician-family communication and patient safety intervention study. The study included 1666 Arabic-, Chinese-, English-, and Spanish-speaking parents of general pediatric and subspecialty patients 17 years and younger in the pediatric units of 7 North American hospitals. Data were analyzed from January 2018 to May 2020., Exposures: Language-comfort data were collected through parent self-reporting. LCE was defined as reporting any language besides English as the language in which parents were most comfortable speaking to physicians or nurses., Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was adverse events; the secondary outcome was preventable adverse events. Adverse events were collected using a systematic 2-step methodology. First, clinician abstractors reviewed patient medical records, solicited clinician reports, hospital incident reports, and family safety interviews. Then, review and consensus classification were completed by physician pairs. To examine the association of LCE with adverse events, a multivariable logistic regression was conducted with random intercepts to adjust for clustering by site., Results: Of 1666 parents providing language-comfort data, 1341 (80.5%) were female, and the mean (SD) age of parents was 35.4 (10.0) years. A total of 147 parents (8.8%) expressed LCE, most of whom (105 [71.4%]) preferred Spanish. Children of parents who expressed LCE had higher odds of having 1 or more adverse events compared with children whose parents expressed comfort with English (26 of 147 [17.7%] vs 146 of 1519 [9.6%]; adjusted odds ratio, 2.1; 95% CI, 1.2-3.7), after adjustment for parent race and education, complex chronic conditions, length of stay, site, and the intervention period. Similarly, children whose parents expressed LCE were more likely to experience 1 or more preventable adverse events (adjusted odds ratio, 2.3; 95% CI, 1.2-4.2)., Conclusions and Relevance: Hospitalized children of parents expressing LCE were twice as likely to experience harms due to medical care. Targeted strategies are needed to improve communication and safety for this vulnerable group of children.

Although pediatric hospital medicine (PHM) is in its adolescence, it is already having a major impact on patient care, quality, safety, and education. Pediatric hospitalists have been front-and-center in the safety and quality movement, driving change as clinicians, applying evidence-based medicine to standardize practice and promulgate evidence-based guidelines, and playing a central role in optimizing the function of inter-professional teams. Pediatric hospitalists have championed the importance of patient-and family-centeredness of care and the need to incorporate principles of health literacy into all aspects of clinical care and research. Beyond delivering care, pediatric hospitalists have prominent roles as hospital leaders, educators, and researchers and have played a critical role in promoting improvements in health and health care outcomes. In its continued evolution, clinical care will undoubtedly remain the major focus, though with subspecialty status, the field will be expected to accelerate innovations in systems-based practice, advance clinical learning environments, and drive further improvements in quality of care., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)