SESAME stands for Standard Elements in Studies of Adverse Events and Medical Error.
SESAME was developed by transdisciplinary, international collaborative of researchers, clinicians, methodologists and patient safety experts utilizing the Equator Network development guidelines. SESAME is intended for use by patient safety researchers for studies focused broadly on safety events, near misses, adverse events and medical error with the goal of improving transparency and completeness of reporting. This allows for reproducibility, informed comparisons and assimilation of knowledge. Use of reporting guidelines is increasingly required by medical journals and funders to ensure high-quality methods. Multiple publications have observed that important data elements in studies of adverse events are frequently incompletely or unreported, that fidelity of the work to the stated approach is poor or not demonstrated and that different approaches or definitions for basic constructs cloud comprehension. SESAME is an attempt to enhance reporting, facilitate standardization and improve understanding.
Use of SESAME
Unlike many checklists, SESAME is not tied to a specific study design, but rather to a topic area. Therefore, SESAME is intended to be complimentary to, not replacing, other reporting guidelines that may be appropriate for a particular study methodology (e.g. STROBE, PRISMA). Like other reporting guidelines, SESAME should be viewed as a living, ongoing effort with periodic future revisions to address issues that arise based on comments, critiques and new evidence. Future efforts might include extensions of the checklist to address specific areas (e.g. adverse drug events) if the need is felt to exist. We anticipate the inclusion of translations of the checklist into a number of languages in the near future.
Documents and publications produced by the SESAME Development Team are generally open-access and are available for download on this website.
How to Cite the SESAME Checklist
Please see the Resources and Publications page for instructions.
