Developing an Error Reporting System for Health Centers

Unpleasant incidents are one of the biggest problems in health system and error reporting system is an efficient way to improve patient’s safety. Therefore, this study was conducted with the purpose of assess reporting error system in one of the pediatric hospitals in Tehran and finally a proposed model for health centers was presented.
This was qualitative study. The procedures of study included four phases such as identifying status of selected hospitals in the error management system, identifying the status of error reporting systems in selected countries, identifying the features, requirements and benefits of setting up an error reporting system and develop a proposed model for health centers. Triangular method was used to collect information and descriptive content analysis and consensus opinion was used to analyze the data.
Demographic, cultural, organizational, legal-regulatory and financial factors have been introduced as the main barriers of error reporting in the respective hospital. Structural and process criteria should be strengthened to establish a desired reporting system. The process of incidents detection, incidents drawing, incident analysis, review and share errors, implementing solutions and monitoring and evaluation are recommended to design an error reporting system.
The competitive key to manage medical’s error successfully is to establish a voluntary reporting system, commitment of senior managers, change the culture of blame and removing barriers of reporting errors. So, healthcare system needs to provide an error reporting system with learning and proactive approach to improve quality of services and safety of infrastructure.