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A healthcare incident or adverse event is an unfavorable event (e.g., a medical error, patient injury, or equipment failure) that harms a patient, caregiver, or other individuals—or has the potential to harm them.
But why is it so important to report healthcare incidents?
Incident reporting in healthcare refers to collecting healthcare incident data with the goal to improve patient safety and care quality. Done well, it identifies safety hazards and guides the development of interventions to mitigate risks, thereby reducing harm.
Incident reports help staff identify and change the individual or system-level factors contributing to medical errors. Medical staff—such as nurse managers, front-line nurses, pharmacists, or physicians—who are directly involved in or observe the adverse event or the actions leading up to it typically submit the majority of incident reports. (According to The Joint Commission in the United States, nurses submit the highest number of incident reports.) But ideally, your organization has a mechanism for anyone—staff, patient, family, or visitor—to report an incident.
At the organizational level, incident reporting can foster internal transparency and cultivate a continuous improvement culture when encouraged by nurse managers and other leaders.
When encouraging your workforce to report incidents and events, of course it’s important to highlight at a high level how the process improves patient-care quality and the safety of all healthcare participants. After all, those are among the primary goals of every healthcare organization.
But you may be missing out on opportunities to communicate some of the more subtle reasons to encourage reporting of healthcare incidents. The majority of clinicians and healthcare staff want to learn and readily accept instruction on ways to improve. That’s true whether an incident involved them, a coworker in their department, or a staff member in another part of the organization. The caveat is that event reporting and subsequent learnings must be fostered in a blame- and shame-free environment.
In onboarding and training, share with staff the professional benefits of incident reporting, such as the following:
Incident reporting improves patient safety and care quality at the enterprise, facility/site, and departmental levels as well. Some of the primary benefits include the following:
It improves safety for all healthcare participants: The number-one reason to encourage incident reporting is to ensure that the many positive contributions of your organization at the patient, facility, and community levels are not overshadowed by a safety breach. It’s imperative to do everything possible to protect every patient, staff member, visitor, vendor, or any other individual who walks through your doors or does business with the organization virtually.
It helps identify root causes: All healthcare incidents have a cause. The root causes must be identified—and corrected—to try to prevent adverse events from recurring. A patient incident report is a detailed, written account of the chain of events leading up to an adverse event. The root cause(s), such as communication problems, inconsistent procedures, or inadequate staffing, lies somewhere in that chain of events. Incident management software analyzes the causes of each incident. Correcting or avoiding the deficiency can help eliminate the undesirable consequence from recurring.
It hones policies and procedures: By increasing transparency, incident reporting sheds light on factors that contribute to errors and adverse events, such as:
It improves clinical risk management: Incident reports are essential data points for clinical risk management. Hospital administrators must know their organization’s safety performance and be able to identify preventable issues that increase their risk exposure. Assessing clinical risks allows hospitals to provide high-quality care and a safe working environment for all staff.
It helps facilitate continuous quality improvement: Hospitals focus on improving patient safety and care quality by continuously evaluating and improving their clinical processes and other patient-related operations (e.g., admission and discharge procedures). Incident reporting identifies potential areas of quality improvement and helps the organization succeed in its clinical quality improvement efforts.
It can promote continuous learning: Using resolved patient incident reports as case studies or in staff training documents and live sessions helps prepare your healthcare workforce for real situations. Staff who learn from their own or others’ mistakes can better prevent more incidents from occurring.
It captures useful data for big-picture analysis: Managers must continuously report statistics and aggregated data to administrators and/or the board. The more data there is about quality and safety, the better—and incident reporting management dashboards can help. The collection of data on incidents, complaints, and via checklists is just the first step toward improving quality and safety. The next step is analyzing the data and informing the organization through reports and dashboards to discover trends, prioritize risks, and monitor key performance indicators.
It can help reduce costs: Gaps in staff scheduling that delay care and jeopardize the safety and draw fines and penalties for non-compliance with governmental or sector regulations. Often, errors result in costly legal suits and bad press. All of these are negative outcomes that may have started with a single incident. Encouraging staff to stay on top of risk mitigation through incident reporting is a proven way to help reduce unnecessary costs.
Under-reporting of adverse events and medical errors is common. Public health researchers estimate that only 10-20% of errors are ever reported and of those, 90-95% cause no harm to patients. Therefore, the adverse events that do harm patients are not being reported and examined. Under-reporting may be due to several common barriers to incident reporting.
Assess the potential barriers to reporting in your organization on a regular basis, beginning with the examples below:
>> Learn more about these hurdles in our blog “Barriers to incident reporting in healthcare”.
The healthcare professional who witnessed the event—or the first staff member who was notified about it—should file the report.
The incident report is required any time:
Complete the incident report as soon as possible, while the details are still fresh, but no more than 24-48 hours after the incident occurred.
who, what, where, when, and how: Incident reports should describe what happened, answering key questions. Incident reporting needs may vary by organization, but this basic information is generally required:
Incident reports should focus on the facts, detailing direct observations, actions taken, the assistance provided, and communications initiated:
Despite the availability of incident reporting systems, many healthcare organizations still rely on manual, paper-based incident reporting, often using hand-written reports. Manual incident reporting is a time-consuming, costly, error-prone process that has many limitations, including low-quality data and limited flexibility.
Collecting incident data is just the first step in the incident management process. To identify and correct safety problems, the right people have to be able to access, sort, organize and analyze that incident data, something that is very challenging—if not impossible—when using paper reports.
To take full advantage of incident reporting, use incident management software that collects incident data electronically, stores that data in a central database, and analyzes it using proven methods.
SaaS software solutions for incident reporting:
Or learn more in one of our blogs:
Suggested posts about incident management
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We help healthcare organizations to increase safety for patients, employees and their workplace and to reduce risks. Therefore we develop software to easily collect and analyze quality data and to start and monitor improvement plans.
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