Using patients' experiences of adverse events to improve health service delivery and practice: protocol of a data linkage study of Australian adults age 45 and above.

Evidence of patients' experiences is fundamental to creating effective health policy and service responses, yet is missing from our knowledge of adverse events. This protocol describes explorative research redressing this significant deficit; investigating the experiences of a large cohort of recently hospitalised patients aged 45 years and above in hospitals in New South Wales (NSW), Australia.