Is health care getting safer?

Performance of the Global Assessment of Pediatric Patient Safety (GAPPS) Tool

“…24,25 Voluntary reporting remains the mainstay of patient safety tracking in most institutions, despite a wealth of data demonstrating its inadequacy. 26,27 Administrative screening tools, although an improvement over voluntary reporting, are likewise relatively insensitive and imprecise.…”

Safety Incidents in the Primary Care Office Setting

“…28 This affects the validity and generalizability of our findings, which should be regarded as essentially inductive, and hypothesis generating, requiring confirmation in further studies. 29,30 Despite this, reporting to the NRLS has increased in the last decade, providing large quantities of data from which to generate learning. 31,32 There may be other harmful incident types occurring in family practice that are underreported owing to fear of reprimand.…”

Learning from incidents in health care: Critique from a Safety-II perspective

“…This leads to approaches that aim to measure and to reduce patient harms by introducing barriers, safeguards, procedures and policies. However, the literature suggests that progress with improvements in patient safety has been slow (Sari et al, 2007, Vincent et al, 2008. Some have argued that the exclusive focus on incidents is detrimental to progress on patient safety, because in practice incidents are simply classified and reduced to convenient numbers (from a management perspective) with no real insights into everyday clinical work, while this analysis consumes most of an organisation's resources dedicated to patient safety (Cook, 2013).…”