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. 2017 Mar;24(2):91-95.
doi: 10.1136/ejhpharm-2016-000926. Epub 2016 May 25.

Investigating the cost and efficiency of incident reporting in a specialist paediatric NHS hospital and impact on patient safety

Anthony Sinclair  1 , Aurélie Guérin  1 , Charlene Robin  2 , Prasanta Dey  3
Affiliations

Investigating the cost and efficiency of incident reporting in a specialist paediatric NHS hospital and impact on patient safety

Anthony Sinclair et al. Eur J Hosp Pharm. 2017 Mar.

Abstract

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the incident reporting process (IR1s), to calculate the costs of reporting incidents in this context and to gain an indication of how economic the process was and whether it could be improved to yield better outcomes.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of a sample, 10.47% (n=150) selected from 1432 medication incident report summaries, generated at Birmingham Children's Hospital, a specialist tertiary referral paediatric centre, during 2014 and collated through the national Datix incident reporting system software was analysed and the associated staff time required to complete each step of the incident reporting process was costed. The staff costs for various grades of staff were averaged across the staff actually involved, using data calculated by the Personal Social Services Research Unit.

Results: The analysis showed that the incident reporting process involved 262 staff on 2942 occasions (19.16 staff episodes per incident form completed) at a cost of £337.16 per incident form completed.

Conclusions: The study showed that the incident reporting system was a labour intensive process. The numbers of staff involved in the process particularly as a result of the email distribution activity did appear to have room for efficiencies. However, it proved to be relatively inexpensive from a cost perspective. With redesign, arguably the emphasis could be moved away from the recording process to learning in order to gain improved patient safety outcomes.

Keywords: Efficiency; HEALTH ECONOMICS; PAEDIATRICS.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The number of responses (Y-axis) and time taken in 5 min blocks to complete an incident form.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The number of responses (Y-axis) and the time taken in time blocks (minutes) to investigate an incident.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The number of respondents (Y-axis) and the time spent (again in 5 min time blocks) processing incident summary-related emails.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Number of responses (Y-axis) and 5 min time blocks for time spent discussing incidents in the paediatric intensive care unit safety team meetings.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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