Patients are considered a potentially important source of information about problems or incidents within health care [
1]. Their observations can be used in health care quality and safety improvement initiatives [
1]. While it has been recognized that not all patients may be able or willing to identify problems and incidents in their care, errors detected by patients are not easily identified by other means such as reports from health professionals or medical record reviews [
2]. Patients' perceptions of problems and incidents may thus add to a broader understanding of problems in in-patient care [
3]. Patients may be particularly capable to report on interpersonal problems, such as lack of respect or insufficient information, and on incidents related to the delivery of care. Patients may, however, be less likely to notice deficiencies in technical quality of health care and in the appropriateness of medical decisions [
4]. Research on the patient perspective on problems and incidents in health care rarely includes ethnic minority patients. There is, as Johnstone and Kanitsaki [
5] put it, a "paucity" of research on the experiences with problems and incidents of patients from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. That it may be important to include ethnic minority patients' perceptions of problems and incidents within health care, is indicated by the large amount of studies that document racial/ethnic disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of various conditions [
6]. Language differences between care provider and patient as well as the use of family or friends as interpreters instead of professional interpreters can lead to errors and incidents, with potentially serious clinical consequences [
7‐
10]. Bias, stereotyping, prejudice, and clinical uncertainty on the part of health care providers may contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Important safety incidents in the eyes of ethnic minority patients were those in which racism or prejudice occurred [
11]. Garrett et al. found in their study that immigrant patients in the Emergency Department experienced negative events in relation to staff neglect, communication and language issues, as well as medication and diagnostic errors [
12].
In order to get more insight in the situations in which patients have negative experiences with health care, we explored in this paper the perceptions of immigrant patients in hospital care and treatment. In contrast to other researchers' findings that patients reports are a reliable method to identify error and harm in medical practice [
1], we believed that patient's perceptions of an event may not necessarily match the views of the care provider, and therefore cannot be termed as an adverse event, a patient safety incident or an error. We will use in this paper the term 'negative event' to refer to an abusive, potentially dangerous or life-threatening health care event, as perceived by the patient [
12]. We want to identify the specific situations in which immigrant patients perceived negative events in hospital care and treatment.