Status of Incident Reporting System in Iranian Hospitals: A National Survey

Incident reporting systems are one possible way to learn from mistakes. One of the obstacles to this system are the deficit in common standards for collecting, classifying, analyzing and interpreting events. Therefore, in this study, the compliance of the content of incident reporting systems in Iranian hospitals with the minimal information Model for Patient Safety Incident Reporting Systems (MIMPS) of the World Health Organization (WHO) was compared.

This is a cross-sectional and applied study. Five out of 31 provinces of Iran were randomly selected by cluster sampling method. All 128 university hospitals in 5 provinces were investigated. To collect data, the incident reporting system of each hospital during the first quarter of 2019 was reviewed using the MIMPS of WHO.

In the incident reporting system, Iranian hospitals have paid more attention to the topics of "incident identification and type of incident" with an average of 1.4 and 1.2 more than other topics in the MIMPS and the lowest level of compliance with the MIMPS were in "incident detection" and "measurements after the incident" with an average of 0.07 and 0.01. It seems that the incident reporting systems in Iranian hospitals do not collect and record these data at all. Among the provinces, the hospitals of Yazd province with a mean of 0.78 and a standard deviation of 0.25 (p = 0.003) had a better performance than other provinces in adapting to the MIMPS.

The incident reporting system in Iranian hospitals does not follow the global standard model of MIMPS and it seems that in order for the data to be reliable, it must move towards standardization. Using the MIMPS can be a coordinated model in the country to respond to this problem and facilitate better access and analysis of data.