Perceptions and knowledge of nurses on incident reporting systems: Exploratory study in three Northeastern Italian Departments.

Abstract

Reporting of adverse clinical events (IRs) is believed to be an effective methodology for optimizing health care safety, however, only 1%-3% of incidents are reported by healthcare professionals, lack of information resulting from errors/adverse events/near misses limits the development of safety and improvement measures. This study aimed to identify barrier factors/incentives to report adverse events and find possible improvement strategies and possible correlations between the population under examination and the willingness to report through Incident Reporting. An ad hoc questionnaire was used and administered to 122 nurses belonging to three different departments of an Italian hospital. The frequency with which improvement interventions are noted following an IR report (p = 0.014) and the support received from their managers (p = 0.014) in reporting are among the factors that can have the greatest impact on the use of IR among the respondents. The no-blame policies and the attention that nursing managers place on clinical risk management can influence the culture of safety among nurses. Involving nurse managers in the dissemination of the IR can represent a possible strategy to be undertaken by corporate clinical risk managers in order to increase the culture of safety among nurses.