Patient Safety as a Practice and the Benefits of Incident Reporting

Everyone makes mistakes. Speak to anyone you know and I bet that most, if not all of them have made mistakes. Mistakes do have consequences, some more so than others. The consequence of making a mistake in business could mean that you fail to make a profit and the business ends up going into liquidation- a big deal yes, but not life threatening.

Mistakes in the medical profession are however life threatening. The consequences of mistakes by doctors, nurses and surgeons have far greater implications than others because people’s lives are in the equation. Human error in the medical field affects one in every ten patients and fifty percent of these errors are considered preventable.

Yes, doctors are human like the rest of us and mistakes do happen, but the fact that fifty percent of these errors are considered preventable says something.
Patient safety and healthcare accreditation is a fairly new practice. The first patient safety resolution was passed by the world health assembly in May 2002. The resolution highlighted the responsibilities of the WHO in providing guidance to countries on developing reporting systems, creating awareness and research on patient safety.

Patient safety as a practice has two main aims:

1. To ensure that an acceptable level of quality is maintained across the board in terms of equipment, facilities and service delivery.
2. To minimize human error and the occurrence of accidents by ensuring that healthcare providers follow certain precautions.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of the patient safety issues consider this: In 1999, in the United States alone, a brief by Dr. Lucian Leape confirmed that over one million people were injured by errors in treatment every year. Out of those one million, 120 000 were fatal. That’s a pretty big number when you think about it. In fact, less people were dying in car accidents than from complications arising due to medical error.

Incident reporting is one of the methods that healthcare accreditors are implementing to improve patient safety in healthcare facilities. The aim of incident reporting is to capture detailed information when a mistake occurs or is narrowly avoided to ensure that the particular event does not occur in the future.

Incident reporting is also referred to as near miss reporting and uses a call centre system to gather detailed information on an incident that occurred or nearly occurred. Information regarding the particular event is captured and classed according to healthcare incident types (HITs) and categories. Each incident type has a series of specific questions that aim to generate a structured dataset and natural responses.

Incident reporting has numerous benefits which include:

1. The call centre system is designed to be efficient. Call takes an average of 5-7 minutes.
2. Potential incidents that could have serious consequences are picked up that would not normally have been spotted.
3. The reporting process allows staff to become more aware of when and where an incident may occur and what to look out for based on prior incidents.
4. Staff gain a more in-depth understanding of how the healthcare facility operates.