Barriers to incident reporting

Staff must be encouraged to report less serious incidents and near misses as well as more serious errors if lessons are to be learned and patient safety enhanced A key task in the enhancement of patient safety involves the ability to learn from error.1 The cultural change needed to achieve this requires staff to report the errors and near misses they commit or see others commit, and to use these data appropriately to change policy and practice. In the UK the National Patient Safety Agency has been set up as a body for the collection of errors so …