Incident Reporting Mechanism In Nursing

Incident reporting mechanism is an essential component in nursing occupation that facilitates the identification and monitoring of adverse events or incidents that occur during health care service. It is a defined procedures and protocols that should be placed and disseminate throughout the organization. The reporting system is used to report occurrence such as falls, safety issues for patients, medication errors, treatment and procedural problems, and malfunctioning equipment. The benefit of incident reporting mechanism is to protect patient from injury or harm. In order to maximize patient safety, adverse events, mistakes and errors, and near misses incidents should be reported in a timely and accurate manner. Furthermore, it is also used …show more content…
First, Nurses emotional responses to errors inhibit reporting when their errors or incidents share with patients or other health care workers. They feel worried, guilty, and depressed, and also anxious about patient safety and fear of disciplinary actions and malpractice litigation and liability. Moreover, nurses feel shame of errors and fear of punishment which prevent them to discuss their mistakes with another health care professional and hesitate them to report on system. Haw, C., Stubbs, J., Dickens, G. L (2014) state that nurses would not report medication errors due to lack of knowledge about errors or near miss and how to report it, and also fear the consequences of reporting it and consider that reporting is too much work. Nurse should receive the necessary support to express their feelings and anxiety in order to lessen future error occurrence. Second, increased workload and low nurse to patient ratio is the causes of medication errors. Nurses are accountable for fulfilling of many responsibilities and duties during their working shifts which make them to increase the occurrence of medication errors especially with the shortage of nursing staff. In Canadian hospitals, many medication errors occur due to working overtime, staff workload, inadequately trained staff and resources, poor relation with physicians, unsupportive co-workers, and low job security. (Lilley, Harrington & Snyder, 2011, p. 78). …show more content…
To decrease medication incidents includes the recognition of the responsibilities of individual caregivers. Nurse should accurately report adverse events or errors immediately to charge nurse and then document the time and content of incident in reporting system. Care should be taken while documenting any incident in incident reporting system. All nurses should follow systems and safety processes consistently and appropriately to reduce risk of errors. Individual must recognize themselves and their actions as part of the overall process and their performance and knowledge deficits should be evaluated. In order to improve nursing individuals, their knowledge must be able to develop effective establishments to discontinue and prevent errors from occurring. Furthermore, it is important that to motivate and reward these leading individuals so that they can develop critical skills and mindfulness character traits that will aid in minimizing medication