Can Incident Reports Backfire?

Incident reports are frequently submitted by hospital personnel. Did you ever wonder what happens to them? I have.

Over the years, I estimate that I’ve heard of hundreds of such reports being filed, but rarely have I heard of a problem being solved or for that matter, any action being taken at all.

In fact, I don’t even know where they went or who dealt with them. When I was a department chairman, I sat on quality assurance and risk management committees. Yet we never discussed individual incident reports.

According to a post by patient safety expert Dr. Bob Wachter, the original intent of incident reports was to identify patient harms and increase patient safety. Hospital incident reports are a spinoff from the Aviation Safety Reporting System, which  successfully uses them for identifying potential safety issues such as near misses.

At Dr. Wachter’s hospital, San Francisco General, about 20,000 incident reports were filed every year. That is about half of what the Aviation Safety Reporting System receives per year, and San Francisco General is only one of about 6,000 hospitals in the United States.

Do hospitals train people what to write and not write in incident reports? I don’t think so.

Dr. Wachter feels that analyzing incident reports is not worth it. He estimates that each incident report creates about 80 minutes of work, which multiplied by 20,000 reports equals about 26,600 hours of wasted time. He also says that about 25% of U.S. hospitals do nothing with incident reports. That saves time but renders the reports completely useless.

He says an even bigger problem is that incident reports in his hospital fail to capture most events that harm patients.

That has also been my experience. I think most incident reports are filed by people wanting to “cover their asses,” and most of the reported incidents are minor. A reference in Wachter’s article states that most incident reports are submitted by nurses with only about 2% by doctors.

Incident reports can backfire too. From a 2002 Medscape article: “In some states, under certain conditions, the incident report is considered confidential and cannot be used against the nurse practitioner in a lawsuit. However, if copies are made or the chart reflects that an incident report was completed, the incident report can then be subpoenaed by the patient and used against the defendants in court.”

And from the Louisiana State University School of Law: “The nonjudgmental nature of an incident report is very important because in most cases the incident report will be discoverable in litigation. An accusatory remark in an incident report may gain unintended weight in a legal proceeding.”

Do hospitals train people what to write and not write in incident reports? I don’t think so.

Since incident reports generate a massive amount of wasted time, fail to identify most events that harm patients, are frequently ignored, and can possibly have a negative effect on lawsuits, why are they still being filled out by the thousands?

Skeptical Scalpel is a retired surgeon and was a surgical department chairman and residency program director for many years. He is board-certified in general surgery and a surgical sub-specialty and has re-certified in both several times. For the last 8 years, he has been blogging at SkepticalScalpel.blogspot.comand tweeting as @SkepticScalpel. His blog has had more than 3,000,000 page views, and he has over 18,000 followers on Twitter.