Incident Reporting Culture Among Nurses At Edku Central Hospital

Background: Preventable errors in healthcare are a major problem in today's society that contributes to many negative outcomes for patients and even deaths on a daily basis. Identifying negative outcomes is a necessary first step in creating a safer healthcare system, which can be followed by analysis of cause and action plans to address systemic problems and improve the process of reliability. Although, voluntary reporting systems are widely used to identify negative outcomes, recent literature has found severe limitations and severe underreporting in healthcare organizations. In order to identify medical errors, learn from errors and improve patient safety; the healthcare community introduced a culture of incident report. Incident-reporting culture is a voluntary, anonymous, and confidential analysis system that allows the reporting of incidents and adverse events for analysis by experts in quality improvement and patient safety. Objective: To investigate incident reporting culture among nurses at Edku Central Hospital. Settings: The study was carried out in all inpatient units at Edku Central Hospital at El Behera Governorate, Egypt. Subjets: The study subject will include (N=200): Nurse Manager (Directors, and their assistants) (N=3), First Line Nurse Managers (FLNM) (Head Nurses, and their assistants) (N=20), and staff nurses who will be available at the time of data collection in the previously mentioned units (N=177) distributed as follows: medical N=30, surgical N=35, critical N=69, obstetric N=11, and pediatric N=32 with experience more than 6 months. Tools: Incident reporting culture sheet will be used for the purpose of this study. Results: More than two-thirds of nurses (70.5%) perceived moderate level of incident reporting culture and (5.5%) of nurses perceived high level of incident reporting culture. Conclusion: More than two-thirds of nurses have moderate level of incident reporting culture. Recommendations: nurse director of Hospital should: provide in service education programs for all nurses to keep them up date regarding incident-reporting culture and improving nurses' awareness about incident report tool and process.