We deal with thousands of patients every day and have a responsibility to make sure we’ve got measures in place for safeguarding them, as well as our people, property, resources and our reputation.
But what happens if something goes wrong?
In simple terms an event is classed as a ‘serious incident’ (SI) if our service or care results in one or more of these:
Identifying a serious incident
We have a patient safety team who are responsible for identifying serious incidents by using our Serious incident policy; the SIs are picked up from Datix reports, so it’s really important that you keep using Datix to log any instance where there’s been an error or where things could have gone better, such as:
If the team flag an event as an SI, an investigation officer will be allocated to look into the incident and write a report on what happened, why, and what learning can be taken from it. The investigation officer works in the clinical quality directorate, and they’re usually supported by duty locality offices or managers from elsewhere in the Trust.
If you’ve been involved in an incident that’s raised as an SI, the officer will most likely come and interview you to then write up a full report; remember, the process isn’t about apportioning blame – it’s about finding out what happened and learning from it so that we make sure it doesn’t happen again to someone else. The aim is to complete the report within 45 days of the SI being raised on Datix.
We want to be a service that is clinically honest, responsive, supportive, safe and that listens – to both its people and patients. We’ll be re-launching our clinical e-magazine, Clinical Quality Matters, with a special issue on learning from SIs and complaints, so you can read more about the SI process and some real-life EEAST case studies when it’s published later this month.
Reporting an incident? Call the single point of contact (SPOC) line on 0845 602 6856 (open 24/7).