Problems with incident reporting: Reports lead rarely to recommendations

Specialty-based, voluntary incident reporting in neonatal intensive care: description of 4846 incident reports.

OBJECTIVES To examine the characteristics of incidents reported after introduction of a voluntary, non-punitive incident reporting system for neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in the Netherlands; and to investigate which types of reported incident pose the highest risk to patients in the NICU. DESIGN Prospective multicentre survey. METHODS Voluntary, non-punitive incident reporting was ...

Learning through incident reporting: time to consider a national incident reporting system.

In 1999 the United States’ Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued a report entitled ‘To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System’ which estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 patients die each year in US hospitals as a result of preventable medical errors. According to the report, deaths from preventable medical errors are more common than deaths due to car crashes, AIDS and breast canc...

What to do With Healthcare Incident Reporting Systems

Incident Reporting Systems (IRS) are and will continue to be an important influence on improving patient safety. They can provide valuable insights into how and why patients can be harmed at the organizational level. However, they are not the panacea that many believe them to be. They have several limitations that should be considered. Most of these limitations stem from inherent biases of volu...

Incident reporting in anaesthesiology.

Incident reporting can be a powerful tool to detect weaknesses in the complex system of anaesthesiology. Having its roots in aviation, incident reporting today is used in a variety of medical disciplines at the local and even on the national level. Strength of incident reporting is the potential for learning from rare and potentially dangerous events. To properly set up an incident reporting sy...

Chapter 4. Incident Reporting