Improving reporting of critical incidents through education and involvement

Critical incident reporting involves highlighting events and near-misses which have a potential impact on patient care and patient safety. Reporting of critical incidents is a recognised tool in improving patient safety. Within the community paediatric setting in the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust (BHSCT) there is a paucity of incident report forms. The purpose of this quality improvement project was to establish the barriers to reporting critical incidents and to implement plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycles to create a climate for change. The methodology for this project was to firstly perform a baseline audit to review all submitted critical incident reports for the Community Paediatric team in the BHSCT for a six month period. A questionnaire was distributed to staff within the multidisciplinary team to establish examples of barriers to reporting. Interventions performed included introducing an agreed definition of a critical incident, distributing/presenting questionnaire findings to senior members of the various management teams and providing feedback to healthcare workers after presentation of a critical incident presentation. A review of incident reports was performed over the subsequent six month period to assess how the interventions impacted on incident reporting. Over 12 questionnaires 28 barriers to reporting critical incidents were reported which fell into five separate categories. Staff members were twice as likely to report negativity after reporting a critical incident. Overall critical incident reporting within the BHSCT Community Paediatric team improved from 11 incident reports (1.8 per month) to 22 incident reports (3.7 per month) after completion of the quality improvement project. This represents an increase of 100%.