Patient Safety Reporting System
Patient Safety Reporting System:
Preventing mistakes before they happen
Traditionally, near-miss medical errors have gone unnoticed - and essentially untreated - because they've gone unreported.
NJHCQI has developed a Patient Safety Reporting System - based upon the Aviation Safety Reporting System - that provides a forum for healthcare professionals to report medical errors or "near miss" events in the New Jersey's hospitals.
PSRS is driven by three guiding principles - voluntary participation, protection of confidentiality, and no penalties for those who report.
The system is meant to supplement and inform the state mandatory reporting system which NJHCQI worked to establish,
and to insure that such errors become part of the growing database of information relating to patient safety.
Here's how it works:
- Members of a care team (nurses, physicians, technicians, and other health care professionals) complete an online form with incident-specific information.
- This anonymous, confidential information is forwarded to a committee consisting of professionals from the New Jersey Institute of Nursing.
- A clinical team from the Institute verifies the incident report and submits the revised report to the online database.
- The report is posted online for public viewing to serve as a learning tool.
The PSRS encourages the filing of incident reports for all levels of accidents, whether they result in the death, physical injury, or psychological injury of a patient or employee. Even reports of so-called "near miss situations are important because they provide important data, ideas, and lessons learned from nurses and other health care professionals.