Improving incident reporting among physicians at south health campus hospital.

Content Provider	Europe PMC
Author	Ngo, Jennifer Lau, Darren Ploquin, Jodi Receveur, Tracey Stassen, Kobus Del Castilho, Colin
Copyright Year	2022
Abstract	Reports of adverse events and near-misses provide the opportunity to learn about latent (systems) errors. However, voluntary incident reporting systems are underused by physicians. While reports submitted by nursing staff relate to common hazards such as medication administration or falls, physicians have broader exposure to patients’ entire hospital journey. Reports by physicians have the potential to uncover more serious errors that could span multiple departments and layers of personnel. Organisational safety culture thrives when all staff are represented and feel empowered to share safety concerns.At the South Health Campus (SHC) Hospital in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the baseline proportion of physician-submitted reports within our site’s Reporting and Learning System (RLS) from July 2013 to December 2016 was 1.12%. We implemented an intervention to double the proportion of physician-submitted RLS reports, using quality improvement methods.Focus groups identified lack of experience with the RLS system, lack of feedback or closure after an RLS submission, and apprehensions about disclosing the incident to the affected patient as barriers to physician submission. Accordingly, the intervention involved direct responses from physician leadership to each physician-submitted RLS report, multimedia demonstrations of efficient RLS submission to physician groups and medical learners, and linkage to materials on safe disclosures. Effectiveness was assessed using a controlled before-and-after design, comparing SHC with the rest of Calgary and with the rest of Alberta.Following the intervention, the proportion of RLS reports that were physician submitted increased to 2.65% (OR 2.42 [95% CI 1.96 to 3.02], p<0.001), sustained over the following 4 years. While an increase was observed for the rest of Calgary, it was smaller (OR 1.27 [1.15 to 1.40], p<0.001). A decrease in the odds of physician submission was observed for the rest of Alberta. Differences between sites were significant (p<0.001).Overall, we found that physician-submitted incident reports can be increased and sustained over time if submitters receive personalised feedback by a physician safety leader. At our site, reports submitted by physicians have been valuable in uncovering complex systems issues that may not have been readily apparent.
Journal	BMJ Open Quality
Volume Number	11
PubMed Central reference number	PMC9557309
Issue Number	4
PubMed reference number	36207052
e-ISSN	23996641
DOI	10.1136/bmjoq-2022-001945
Language	English
Publisher	BMJ Publishing Group
Publisher Date	2022-10-01
Publisher Place	BMA House, Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9JR
Access Restriction	Open
Rights License	This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.
Subject Keyword	incident reporting adverse events, epidemiology and detection patient safety
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Health Policy Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health Leadership and Management