Improving Patient Safety Through Health Care Incident Reporting, Analysis, and Process Change Systems

Abstract

Every year, tens of thousands of patients in North America die from preventable errors. Incident reporting and learning provide a means of decreasing this number, but due to several barriers, these systems are not currently reaching their full potential in health care. The goal of this study is to improve patient safety by designing strategies to advance incident learning in health care. A literature review was conducted to gather details about health care, aviation, and nuclear power incident learning systems. This information was used to identify areas for improvement in health care’s incident learning processes and extract potential strategies for improvement. The suggested strategies to be developed in this research could be followed by administrators who are making crucial decisions pertaining to the incident learning process. This should help create more effective systems, and in turn, improve patient safety.