Incident Reporting System in Pediatric Intensive Care Units of Cairo Tertiary Hospital: An Intervention Study

Background: Incident reporting system (IRS) deepens the understanding of the frequency of adverse events and near misses. Voluntary reporting is an essential step to improve patient safety. Objectives: The study aimed to apply an efficient and reliable system for incident reporting to enhance patient safety practices in pediatric intensive care units (PICUs). Methods: A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study design was conducted to implement a voluntary anonymous IRS in PICUs. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 health care personnel. A tailored educational program was provided to 73 health care personnel. A questionnaire was administered before and three months after the intervention to assess their attitude towards incident reporting. Results: The interviewed health care providers highlighted that no IRS was established in the PICUs and most of them never reported any event unless it was a sentinel event. They agreed that an IRS would be beneficial to PICUs. The average percentage of positive responses for “Frequency of error reporting’ increased significantly from 23.8% to 42%. Communication problems, hygienic errors, therapeutic errors, and diagnostic errors accounted for 34%, 32%, 29%, and 5% of the reported potential errors, respectively. Conclusions: IRS implementation improves potential error reporting attitude and practice in PICUs.