The Canadian National System for Incident Reporting in Radiation Treatment (NSIR-RT) Taxonomy

Incident investigation, reporting, and learning are core elements of quality improvement in radiation treatment. This report describes the development of a Canadian National System for Incident Reporting in Radiation Treatment (NSIR-RT), focusing especially on the taxonomy.

The NSIR-RT was developed to provide a framework in Canada for reporting and analyzing radiation treatment incidents. A key objective was to assure compatibility with other international reporting systems to facilitate future information exchange. The Canadian community was engaged at every step of the development process through Delphi consensus building and inter-user agreement testing to promote awareness of the system and motivate broad-based utilization across the country.

The final taxonomy was comprised of 6 data groups (impact, discovery, patient, details, treatment delivery, and investigation) and 33 data categories with predefined menu options. There was a high level agreement within the Canadian community about the final suite of data categories, and broad alignment of these categories with the World Health Organization and other American and European radiation treatment incident classifications.

The Canadian NSIR-RT taxonomy will be implemented as an online, web-based reporting and analysis system. It is expected that the taxonomy will evolve and mature over time to meet the changing needs of the Canadian radiation treatment community and support radiation treatment incident learning on a global scale.