Incident Reporting System in Pediatric Intensive Care Units of Cairo Tertiary Hospital: An Intervention Study

Incident reporting system (IRS) deepens the understanding of the frequency of adverse events and near misses. Voluntary reporting is an essential step to improve patient safety.

The study aimed to apply an efficient and reliable system for incident reporting to enhance patient safety practices in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs).

A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study design was conducted to implement a voluntary anonymous IRS in PICUs. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 health care personnel. A tailored educational program was provided to 73 health care personnel. A questionnaire was administered before and three months after the intervention to assess their attitude towards incident reporting.

The interviewed health care providers highlighted that no IRS was established in the PICUs and most of them never reported any event unless it was a sentinel event. They agreed that an IRS would be beneficial to PICUs. The average percentage of positive responses for “Frequency of error reporting’ increased significantly from 23.8% to 42%. Communication problems, hygienic errors, therapeutic errors, and diagnostic errors accounted for 34%, 32%, 29%, and 5% of the reported potential errors, respectively.