An incident reporting system is the most commonly used method to identify patient safety incidents in a hospital. However, non-reporting of incidents for various reasons is a serious problem. We studied the rate of inpatient falls that were not reported in an incident reporting system but were recorded in medical charts and we evaluated characteristics of those falls by comparing with the falls...

To ensure systems in hospitals improve to make patient care safer, learning must occur when things go wrong. Incident reporting is one of the commonest mechanisms used to learn from harm events and near misses. Only a relatively small number of incidents that occur are actually reported and different groups of staff have different rates of reporting. Nationally, junior doctors are low reporters...

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...

Editor—We were interested to read the article of Professor Mahajan and concur with his view that safety can be improved by learning from incidents and near misses. 1 Furthermore , we agree that investigation of incidents should not underestimate the potential of analysing incidents that are near misses or which have not led to patient harm. 1 We also accept that under-reporting of incidents by ...

BACKGROUND Medical-specific incident reporting systems are critical to understanding error in healthcare but underreporting by doctors reduces their value. OBJECTIVE We conducted a pilot study of the implementation of an online ED-specific incident reporting system in Australasian hospitals and evaluated its use. METHODS The reporting system was based on the literature and input of experts....

Interest in the field of patient safety incident reporting and analysis with respect to Health Information Technology (HIT) has been growing over recent years as the development, implementation and reliance on HIT systems becomes ever more prevalent. One of the rationales for capturing patient safety incidents is to learn from failures in the delivery of care and must form part of a feedback lo...