5 Dealing with incidents, errors and near misses

Patients should always be protected from harm, but mistakes do occasionally happen through things like lack of knowledge, poor communication or sharing of information, stress, failure to take proper care (negligence) or being distracted. They may be:

  • incidents or adverse events due to actions (or lack of actions) that have led to unexpected harm which should have been preventable
  • errors or doing something in the wrong way
  • or near misses whereby a situation which could have harmed an individual was avoided by chance or purpose.

Any of these could occur in your workplace and it’s really important that you recognise when such an incident occurs and know what action to take. In the next audio clip Gail talks about possible incidents that could occur in healthcare settings.

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Transcript: Reporting of incidents in the workplace

Gail
Reporting incidents is very very important, it’s a very important part of your job. If I was to see something happening that was wrong I know the correct procedure within my Trust on how to report that. I have what we call an Incident Report Form and I can fill it in online with all the details.
Before I did that I would probably go and talk to my manager or the nurse in charge and they would then maybe decide to tell me what to do.
It’s very very important that you report anything that is wrong because that’s how we improve our practice. We then need to address that – and it might not be at my level that its addressed, it might be at somebody else’s level, but it will be addressed – and the good thing is that it isn’t to berate anybody, it’s to say ok, this has happened, we don’t like things to happen, but we’re human – it has happened, but how are we going to avoid it happening again. What measures will we put in place to stop that happening again?
I would report a mistake straight away – even though I’d done it and I probably was going to get in trouble for it. I would report it straight away, because I don’t know if I had put that patient in danger and that they needed to have treatment straight away or it be addressed straight away, and at the heart of everything our patient is at the heart of it all, so I would report my mistake straight away.
End transcript: Reporting of incidents in the workplace
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Reporting of incidents in the workplace
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Like Gail, your workplace will have a form which you should complete to record the facts of the incident, accident or near miss. Doing this will help to reduce the same mistakes recurring in the future. You should complete the form as soon as possible after the event and make your manager aware straight away. (Skills for Care 2015e)

4 Handling comments and complaints

6 Equality and diversity