Implementing an Intervention to Improve Physicians’ Incident Reporting in the Hospital Setting: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Objectives: To improve patient safety, information regarding errors must be collected. This practice constitutes one of the strategies that hospital managers use to understand the types of errors that occur at their hospitals. This pilot study aimed to evaluate an intervention designed to improve error reporting percentage among physicians. Methods: The study was conducted at University Hospital A, where data were collected from April 2017 to March 2019. The intervention began in April 2018 and involved the following steps: receiving support and appropriate feedback from the hospital administrator, defining reporting standards, improving the incident reporting system, and having the hospital administrators set clear goals and begin a visualized feedback process. Physicians were the main target for these steps in this study. Results: The percentage of reports submitted by physicians relative to nonphysicians increased from fiscal year (FY) 2017 to FY 2018, with the largest monthly increase within 2018 occurring in November. Physician reporting was higher in FY 2018 than in FY 2017, with the greatest difference observed for December of the respective FYs (p < 0.001, analyzed using Fisher’s exact test). The percentage of reports submitted by physicians increased by 2.6% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.7, 3.5) from FY 2017 to FY 2018, raising the percentage to 9%. Conclusions: Based on these results, it can be said that the intervention effectively increased incident reporting among not only physicians but also nonphysician staff members. In this regard, reporting barriers were broken when hospital administrators encouraged staff to submit incident reports. Active feedback by hospital administrators—the executive class of the hospital—may encourage not only physicians, but also staff members to submit incident reports, thus effectively removing reporting barriers.