Critical incident reporting: learning from errors to improve patient safety
Critical incident reporting: learning from errors to improve patient safety is a scholarly work, published in 2007 in ''Connect The World of Critical Care Nursing''. The main subjects of the publication include medicine, clinical engineering, medical malpractice, quality, patient safety, identification, risk management, incident report, critical success factor, cindynics, medical emergency, near miss, process, and health care. Over the last decade patient safety has become an important focus of interest in all health care areas.Reducing errors in order to improve quality and lower costs in hospitals has become one of the main efforts of risk management.System analysis identifies failures within the whole system to be responsible for critical events occurring in hospitals.Multiple factors on different system levels contribute to the complexity of medical errors; the human risk factor is only one facet of the problem.Critical incident reporting, as an element of risk management, allows the identification of contributing factors to risk situations, reported by personnel directly involved in the process.Subsequent root cause analysis will lead to the proposal of changes to improve performance and to avoid future critical events.Although there are obvious benefits to incident reporting, most hospital reporting systems fail to detect the majority of critical events and some long-lasting misconceptions and scepticisms exist.This paper outlines the basic conditions for a successful incident reporting system and discusses why these systems are still not accepted by some health care professionals.