A test of incident reporting

To evaluate the accuracy of incident reports completely by staff in a long term care facility and to test the adequacy of reporting for comprehensiveness by comparing incident rates to those of a similar facility using Spearman's rank correlation.

1. Literature review. 2. Comparison of two long term care facilities in terms of incident reporting requirements, instructions to staff and categorisation of incidents. 3. Tabulation of rate of incidents over a specific time period. 4. Testing of comparability of the findings using the Spearman's rank correlation.

The review of incident reports at one facility revealed an error rate of approximately 1% when 403 reports were examined for accuracy and completeness using 15 explicit requirements. The categorisation of incident reports by type proved adequate. The Spearman's rank computation confirmed that the rate of incident reporting between the two facilities was very similar.