Whose Voices are Heard in Patient Safety Incident Reports?

Patient safety incident reporting systems are used to monitor adverse events, generate information for risk management and to improve patient safety. A number of electronic reporting systems have been developed, but their data elements appear relatively similar. An inductive data analysis was carried out to find out especially what is the content of descriptions of contributing factors of adverse events. The data consisted of incident reports entered in a hospital based reporting system in the years 2008-2010. Overall, 82 reports of 785 contained free text information about patients' and relatives' involvement in the events reported by staff. We found that patients themselves noticed almost half of these incidents. Of the incidents they noticed, most resulted in moderate harm.