Incident reporting and patient safety

Incident reporting should ideally communicate all information relevant to patient safety. Local incident reporting systems in hospitals typically use an incident form that comprises basic clinical details and a brief description of the incident. Such systems are ideally used as part of an overall safety and quality improvement strategy, but in practice they may be dominated by managing claims and complaints. 1 Specialty reporting systems 2 and large scale systems, such as that of the UK National Patient Safety Agency (www.npsa.nhs.uk/), allow wider dissemina-