Incident management in healthcare: here’s how to do it

Imagine: a care worker accidentally administers the wrong medicine to a client. Now what? This is an example of an incident. If incidents are not handled properly, it is harmful to your healthcare organisation. Incident management in healthcare helps you efficiently resolve incidents and possibly prevent them in the future.

Unfortunately, not all healthcare organisations work with an incident management system yet or this is still done manually, for instance in Excel. This can reduce the willingness to report, leaving you with fewer opportunities for improvement as a quality manager. In this article, you will read how to keep incident management running smoothly for continuous improvement in your healthcare organisation.

Incident reporting and incident management: how does it work?

An incident is an unanticipated event that disrupts processes within your organisation or harms individuals. An incident in healthcare can be anything. Think about:

To resolve these incidents, your healthcare staff must report them. An action is then issued to those who can fix the problem.

The process of incident reporting and analysis within a (healthcare) organisation is called incident management. The aim of incident management is to quickly recognise incidents, record them, efficiently handle them and prevent them in the future.

What types of notifications are there?

To get your incident management right, it is important to know what incident reports are within healthcare: Client Incident reports and Employee Incident Reports.

Client Incident report

This refers to incidents where harm has or could be caused to a client. Some examples are:

4 reasons why your healthcare organisation cannot do without incident management

Incident management helps healthcare organisations in several ways. If you neglect incident management, you will miss many opportunities for improvement and run the risk of large incidents. Here are four reasons why incident management is important for your healthcare organisation.

1. (Preventing serious) errors

According to the survey Victims in Modern Society by the Dutch Victim Support Fund, 185,000 adults in the Netherlands experience medical errors every year. Imagine being a victim of a medical error, with possible consequences for the rest of your life.

Of course, you don’t wish that on anyone. That is why it is important to prevent errors within any healthcare organisation as much as possible. By learning from reported incidents, you can prevent similar mistakes in the future. Incident management helps you do just that.

2. A better quality of service

By recording all incidents with incident management software, you will gain more insight into the weaknesses within your healthcare organisation. If you address these efficiently, you can improve the quality of your services.

3. Greater assurance of continuity of care processes

When incidents occur, they can disrupt your organisation’s care processes. Think of a non-working ECD or a cyber incident. Thanks to good incident management, critical incidents get on top of the pile at handler level. This allows care processes to resume as soon as possible.

4. Clear communication and cooperation

Does an incident occur? Then it is important that the right people get a notification to solve the problem. With good incident management the right department automatically receives a notification so they can deal with the report. Your healthcare organisation will also have insight into reported incidents, allowing internal communication of where areas of concern remain.

What are the obstacles in incident management?

So by reporting incidents, you get more insight into weaknesses within your healthcare organisation. That way, you can not only solve incidents, but also prevent them in the future. This benefits the continuity and quality of care.

Unfortunately, incident management does not always run smoothly at healthcare organisations. Why is this? We list the most important causes here for you:

1. No safe reporting culture

When employees make a mistake, they do not always dare to report it because they fear the consequences. This is why it is important to create a safe reporting culture. Make it clear to your colleagues that they are not penalised after reporting an incident, but rather appreciated!

2. No convenient reporting system

Does your organisation not have a convenient reporting system? This may result in employees being less likely to make reports, either because they do not understand how the system works or because it takes too much time.

3. Lack of time to report

In healthcare, there is still a staff shortage, which means the pressure per care worker is increasing. Therefore, for many employees, it is not feasible to put down daily activities to make a report, especially if reporting takes a lot of time.

4. No confidence in follow-up

Although incident reporting is mandatory in certain cases, not every organisation does something with the reports. If employees make a report and then hear nothing about it, this is not motivating to make a report again in the future.