A standard set of terms for critical incident recording?

The Anaesthetic Specialty Working Group of the Clinical Terms Project has been creating clinical terms for inclusion in the Read clinical classification. It is the intention to include terms to describe critical incidents. Many difficulties were encountered and these are discussed. The current definitions of a critical incident in the anaesthetic literature are too wide to allow a circumscribed set of terms to be generated. The interpretation of a critical incident is not only subjective but also requires a great deal of contextual information to describe it accurately. A method of critical incident reporting using the terms that will be contained within the enhanced Read clinical classification is proposed. These terms may be useful in the construction of a nationwide critical incident register.