Patient safety incident-reporting items in Korean hospitals

Abstract

Objective: To examine incident-reporting items in tertiary hospitals using the framework of the World Health Organization's International Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS).

Design: Cross-sectional survey.

Setting and participants: Forty acute-care tertiary hospitals in Korea (response rate = 90.9%).

Methods: Data were collected using a semistructured questionnaire during on-site interviews or via e-mail. Items were extracted from incident-reporting forms that required a reporter's input, and were analyzed using the ICPS framework. After removing redundant items, unique reporting items were mapped onto ICPS elements. The data are summarized using descriptive statistics.

Results: On average, hospitals used 2.4 incident-reporting forms (range = 1-9) and 136.7 reporting items (range = 31-310). All of the hospitals had incident-reporting items that described 'incident type' and 'incident characteristics'; however, only 7 hospitals (17.5%) had reporting items on incident 'detection', and 18 hospitals (45.0%) collected information on the 'organizational outcomes'. Of the 1145 unique reporting items, 297 (25.9%) were completely mapped onto ICPS elements at different levels of granularity, and 12.7% (n = 145) were mapped onto ICPS elements that had more granular subcategories.

Conclusions: The ICPS framework is a useful reference model for the classification of incident-reporting items. However, further refinements to both the ICPS framework and incident-reporting items are needed in order to better represent data on patient safety. Furthermore, the use of a common reporting form at the national level is recommended for reducing variations in reporting items and facilitating the efficient collection and analysis of patient safety data.

Keywords: International Classification for Patient Safety; classification; hospital incident reporting; patient safety.