Question

What are some barriers to using incident reporting systems for QI and how can those barriers be overcome?

Answer 1

Healthcare sector is a vast field where there are multiple healthcare professionals in patient care.Risk for errors are common in a most busiest unit where the professionals lack time or feel reporting doesn't provide any expected outcome. Dominating or harassing behavior of a superior or a reporting professional to their subordinates, novice have a poor knowledge regarding incident reporting on time,neglecting behavior of the staffs are some barriers in using incident reporting system for quality indicator.

Some of the ways to overcome this are

• Ensuring adequate training is provided to the staffs and instructing to report any incidents withing the specified time limits.As this is the base for improving the quality of care from errors by preventing it from happening in the future.
• Adequate supply of staffs to prevent any shortage of staff so that the stress ,burden on limited number of staff can be reduced from occurence of any incidents in future
• Getting feedback from staffs at regular intervals
• The non dominant or friendly nature of higher or reporting authority