What are incident reports telling us? Australian study

This report published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care compared reported medical errors in two Australian hospitals. It revealed that only a small number of clinically important prescribing errors were captured in the incident systems, with some 78.1% going undetected.

The authors of the paper, "What are incident reports telling us? A comparative study at two Australian hospitals of medication errors identified at audit, detected by staff and reported to an incident system", conclude that there are inaccuracies inherent in the practice of using incident frequency to compare patient risk or quality performance within or across hospitals. They suggest that there are new approaches, such as data mining, which are needed to support better control of medication errors.

Westbrook JI, Li L, Lehnbom EC, Baysari MT, Braithwaite J, Burke R, I  International Journal for Quality in Health Care.  First published online, January 2015. ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzu098