BMJ  2007;334:51 (13 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.39071.441609.80

Editorials

Incident reporting and patient safety

Reporting is useful, but more emphasis is needed on measurement and safety improvement programmes

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Incident reporting should ideally communicate all information relevant to patient safety. Local incident reporting systems in hospitals typically use an incident form that comprises basic clinical details and a brief description of the incident; there may be a list of designated incidents that should always be reported. Such systems are ideally used as part of an overall safety and quality improvement strategy, but in practice they may be dominated by managing claims and complaints.¹

Specialty reporting systems² and large scale systems, such as that of the UK National Patient Safety Agency (www.npsa.nhs.uk/), allow wider dissemination of lessons learnt and emphasise the need for parallel analysis and development of solutions. In this week's BMJ a case note review by Sari and colleagues finds that local reporting systems are poor at identifying patient safety incidents, particularly those involving harm,³ echoing the findings of similar studies.⁴ Does this mean that . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ Department of Biosurgery and Surgical Technology, Imperial College London, St Mary's Hospital, London W2 1NY

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