Effectiveness of a 4-strategy Interventional Package to promote voluntary incident reporting by health care workers.

In healthcare organizations, incident reporting plays a critical role in patient safety and quality improvement initiatives. Incident reporting refers to the process of documenting and analyzing sentinel, adverse, near misses, and other incidents that occur within the healthcare setting. These reports provide valuable insights into system vulnerabilities, human errors, and process deficiencies, ultimately leading to enhanced patient care and the prevention of future occurrences. Despite its significance, incident reporting in healthcare organizations often faces challenges such as underreporting and incomplete documentation. Many incidents go unreported due to fear of blame, reprisal, or a lack of understanding of the reporting process. This creates a significant barrier to learning from adverse events and implementing corrective measures. To overcome these challenges, healthcare organizations need to adopt strategies that promote and facilitate incident reporting. This article aims to implement strategic interventional package to measure increase incident reporting within the selected tertiary care center, ultimately improving patient safety and organizational performance.

A study by Smith et al. (2018) found that providing healthcare workers with training on incident reporting procedures significantly increased reporting rates. Similarly, Johnson et al. (2019) demonstrated that educational interventions focusing on the importance of incident reporting and the potential impact on patient safety led to improved reporting behavior. These findings align with the results of our study, highlighting the effectiveness of educational training as a strategy to promote incident reporting. A study by Williams et al. (2018) demonstrated that simplifying the reporting process and ensuring ease of use led to increased incident reporting rates. Similarly, Green et al. (2022) found that a user-friendly reporting system improved reporting compliance and accuracy. Consistent with these findings, our study emphasized on strategies like appointing AIRS SPOCs (Special Point of Contact) for various departments to ease voluntary incident
reporting. Overall, the findings of this study are supported by previous research that has investigated the individual components of the 4-strategy interventional package. By combining educational training, leadership support for reward and recognition, non punitive culture and a user-friendly incident reporting system, healthcare organizations can create a comprehensive approach to promote voluntary incident reporting among healthcare worker

A drastic increase in incident/near miss reporting numbers has been observed from the statistical data. This showed that incidents/near misses were under reported earlier due to poor involvement of ground level staff assuming that incident reporting will be punitive and they are only to be reported by Managers and HOD’s. With the implementation of this 4-strategy interventional package ground staff felt a sense of involvement, accountability, responsibility and non-punishable towards reporting incidents/near misses and facilitated them to contribute towards improvement of patient safety. It is important to acknowledge that increasing incident reporting is an ongoing journey that requires dedication, continuous improvement, and a culture of learning and transparency for its sustenance.