CQC: Reporting incidents

Why is it important to report incidents?

Reporting of incidents to our trust database, Datix, helps to protect patients from avoidable harm by: z raising awareness z increasing opportunities for staff to analyse mistakes z implementing safety measures to prevent reoccurrence of incidents What is vital for safe care is that all staff feel confident to report incidents. If you do not, then please talk to your line manager. Across PAHT, we do review incidents that are reported as a ‘near miss’, as this can help us to reduce occurrence of serious harm incidents in the longer term. It is important to note that a critical incident is rarely caused by one person alone, and so by working together we can all play our part in reducing patient harm and making PAHT a safer place to receive care. The process is exactly the same for incidents that impact on our staff. We need to be alerted to them quickly to allow actions to be taken, either locally or across the organisation to keep all colleagues safe. High performing Trusts are ones where its people learn from errors, omissions, patterns of incidents and do this quickly to enable safer ways of delivering care to patients to be implemented.

National review of incidents

On a monthly basis, our patient safety incidents are uploaded onto the National Resource and Learning System (the national system). These are reviewed by the safety team working at NHS England, where they identify recurring issues taking place at several Trusts.

From this national review, they issue national safety alerts and equipment recall notices, all of which ensure patient care is safer.

Training

If you require training on how to raise an incident on Datix, please discuss this with your line manager. If you are a line manager, the governance team have recently launched a training programme that you will find useful.

It can be accessed on Alex, in the training zone, under governance awareness and training. There you can view the governance awareness and training plan for 2020/2021.