Effective incident management in healthcare: strategies and best practices

What do we mean by an incident?

An incident in healthcare is an unexpected event that affects the quality of care and may result in client harm. Being able to act effectively and acutely in the event of an incident is crucial. First and foremost, of course, to protect and guarantee the health of the client, but also for the reputation and right to exist of the healthcare institution involved.

Examples of care-related incidents include administering the wrong medication or an incorrect amount of a drug, but also a patient falling out of bed is considered an incident. Care-related incidents can vary in size, but in addition, it is also important to whom an incident relates. Thus, we distinguish between PIR and EIR reports:

PIR notification

PIR is short for Patient Incident Reporting. This refers to an incident where the client's health has been harmed. Examples include misdiagnosis, administration of incorrect medication, or a client falling while showering.

EIR notification

You guessed it: EIR stands for Employee Incident Reporting. This type of incident is somewhat less obvious at first when talking about incidents within healthcare. It concerns incidents that have already caused or may yet cause harm to a healthcare employee. Examples of such incidents are psychological injury, major property damage, or occupational disease.

The incident management system

An incident management system provides the much-needed and essential structure necessary when managing incidents within the healthcare industry. When an incident occurs, quick action is crucial. The incident must be reported and the right people must be put to work. Reporting the incident, starting the process to solve the problem, and analyzing the incident; it all happens within an incident management system. Very efficient, because you have one single environment for all parts of the process: the notification, the problem resolution, and the analysis.

What types of incident management do we distinguish?

When it comes to incident management, we distinguish between reactive incident management, proactive incident management, and integrated incident management.

• In reactive incident management, the focus is on responding to the incident shortly after it occurs. In other words, it is simply about solving the problem. Reactive incident management involves capturing the incident data, conducting an investigation into the cause, and implementing the solution to prevent further damage.
• Proactive incident management focuses on identifying potential risks and taking preventive measures before an incident occurs, or may occur. This involves looking at historical data, trends and patterns, and implementing improvements to address and prevent potential problems before they occur. Proactive incident management is closest to risk management in that it involves protecting yourself and preventing to some degree rather than repairing or fixing.
• Integrated incident management. Integrated incident management involves a combination of reactive and proactive incident management. It includes capturing and analyzing incident data as well as identifying trends and patterns and developing strategies to prevent incidents.

The benefits of an incident management system

As we said at the beginning, where work is done, mistakes are made. It is crucial within healthcare to minimize these mistakes and learn from them so that they can be prevented in the future. An incident management system is very important precisely for this purpose. Its use therefore offers several benefits:

• Efficiency
  An incident maangement system automates the process of capturing incident data and and assigning responsibilities. Thus, it saves time and lowers administrative burdens. It reduces the time required to handle an incident.
• Quality improvement
  A well-designed incident management system provides a comprehensive overview of all parties involved, the nature of incidents, and the actions taken. You can use this information for process optimization and, related to that, to reduce the number of incidents, but also to improve the overall quality of care provided.
• Clear communication
  In the event of an incident, it is important that the right people are notified in order to start solving the arising problem as soon as possible. With a well-designed incident management system, the appropriate department or person in charge is automatically notified so that resolution of the report can begin quickly.
• Continuity of care processes
  When an incident has occurred, you often see that it has quite an impact on the workload. Just think of a physician who is called in to handle an icident, and thus cannot do his normal work while he is busy with incident management. With the help of a good incident management system, critical incidents are placed on top of the stack with the practitioner. This allows regular care processes to resume as quickly as possible.

Why is my incident management system not successful?

‘Bring on that incident management system’, I can hear you thinking it out loud. Problems solved - or at least that's what you expect. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. We still hear many stories of healthcare organizations working with an incident management system, but where it is not yet running smoothly. There are several reasons for this:

No safe reporting culture

‘You can learn from mistakes’, we stated at the beginning of this article. But is every organization really like this? If you want to learn from your mistakes, you must ensure that the mistakes you make are reported. It is therefore very important to make it clear to your employees that they will not be disadvantaged after reporting an incident. Creating a safe reporting culture is essential to successful incident management.

No trust in follow-up

The foundation of incident management is trust, and the same goes for reporting incidents. Make sure work is done on every report. An employee who reports an incident and then hears nothing more about it might first scratch behind his or her ears when the next incident occurs. Then he or she might decide not to report the incident because he or she won't get feedback anyway. The lack of response from the organization is demotivating and guaranteed not to lead to better management of incidents.

Prevent repetitive errors with an incident management system

Certainly you can learn from making mistakes. But when it comes to healthcare incidents, it helps tremendously if you use an effective incident management system. Such a system is crucial for ensuring and improving quality of care. By systematically registering, analyzing and monitoring incidents, healthcare institutions can respond quickly to incidents, and possibly take preventive measures to avoid similar incidents in the future. A safe reporting culture and a reliable follow-up process are essential!

WoodWing Scienta recently added risk management to the functionalities that are part of the Scienta quality management system. Incident management, strongly related to risk management in healthcare, is a spearhead in healthcare. Curious about the incident management capabilities WoodWing Scienta offers? Then contact one of our Scienta experts immediately – they will be happy to help!