What is incident management?
Put simply, incident management is the necessary actions and processes implemented by an organisation in order to identify, analyse and respond to problems or incidents, whilst taking relevant actions to prevent their reoccurrence.
Within a healthcare organisation incidents are an adverse event such as medication errors, equipment failure, patient injury or anything that harms or injures a patient, healthcare professional, care giver or any individual within the organisation. Incident management within healthcare organisations looks to improve the quality of care given and patient safety, which is why it is so important to implement an effective strategy and incident reporting system or process.
Find out how we can help your healthcare organisation.
Why is incident management so important in healthcare?
Effective incident management and reporting within healthcare organisations is so important in the improvement of patient safety and quality of care. With the implementation of an effective incident management and reporting system, healthcare organisations can successfully identify safety hazards to patients, mitigate risks and prevent reoccurrence, ultimately reducing the potential harm to patients and individuals within the organisation.
Incident reports give healthcare organisations an insight into the underlying factors that contribute to medical errors, patient injury and any adverse events that cause harm. By implementing an accessible and structured process of reporting healthcare incidents and collecting this valuable data, organisations can look at the root causes and begin to implement a plan on how to stop reoccurrence and look to improve their processes.
What are the benefits of effective incident management in healthcare?
There are several that come with an effective incident reporting and management strategy, benefiting the organisation, staff and patients:
- Improves safety for all healthcare staff, patients and service users
- Helps identify root causes and underlying factors
- Highlights policies and procedures
- Facilitates continuous organisational improvement
- Improves risk management, clinical and non-clinical
- Improves compliance
- Captures important data to gain insight into the organisation as a whole
- Provides a timeline of incident data
- Prevents reoccurrence
- Identifies individuals reoccurring incidents
What are the effects of poor incident management in healthcare?
- Inadequate quality of care and patient safety
- Non compliances
- Reoccurring incidents and harm to individuals
- No opportunity to learn or improve from past events
- Increased costs
- Resistance from staff in reporting incidents due to no follow up action
How can Vantage help your healthcare organisation?
Our Incident Management module provides your organisation with the tools to effectively record all incidents, adverse events and patient safety events, from near misses to actual incidents and anywhere in between. With our Incident Management module and Incident Reporting, you will be able to learn from these incidents to improve patient safety and ensure that all logged incidents are actioned upon, triggered to the relevant individuals and are readily accessible for review and investigation.
“The effect it has had on the quality of our, previously paper-based, incident reporting has been nothing short of transformative.”
St. Helena Hospice
