Incident Reporting in Health Care: Facilitating Safety and Security? - Essay Sample

Introduction

Incident reporting has been accepted by various industries across the world as one of the vital means of improving security and safety at the workplace. In this light, it has been introduced into the health care sector to help facilitate safety in health care service delivery. Although there is widespread implementation of incident reporting across various countries, there is still lack of clarity as to whether incident reporting results in significant improvement in safety within the health care sector (Kelly, Blake & Plunkett, 2016). Thus, because each country and state have their regulatory mechanisms of incident reporting process, this paper presents a summary of the incident reporting process in acute care settings according to Florida state regulatory requirements.

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In Florida, the patients possess the rights to access the records made by the healthcare provided that there is likelihood of adverse medical incident within the health care facility. In the case of such incidents, the health care facility (i.e. hospital) has to notify the patients who are likely to be affected by the adverse event. The adverse events must be reported to the Agency for Health Care Administration within 15 days of such occurrences by the health facility involved (Kelly et al., 2016). Moreover, the physician has the responsibility of reporting such adverse incidents to the Health Department within the health facility affected.

Moreover, it is the duty of every hospital in Florida to establish an internal risk management program which has the responsibility of analyzing and correcting the adverse incidents as well as solving the patient's grievances. The health regulations in Florida also provides for the establishment of the Health care risk Manager Advisory council which advices the Health care administration Agency regarding the management of health care risks within the facility (Kelly et al., 2016).

Furthermore, the regulations provide for the establishment Children and Family services which creates a central abuse hotline for receiving all the reports relating to abuse and exploitation of the children. The body should also adopt rules regarding the procedures for reporting any violations of patients' rights, especially patients undergoing mental health treatment.

There is a procedure of reporting incidents within an acute care setting provided under the Florida state regulations (Kelly et al., 2016). The events under regulations are classified as critical incidents and reportable incidents. The essential episodes in the healthcare set up, for instance, include unexpected death of the client, life-threatening injury, sexual misconduct as well as client arrest among others (Kelly et al., 2016). In the case of unexpected death of a patient, a report of death (ROD) is initiated by the Medical Manager upon notification. The story is then forwarded to the State office for further actions.

Reportable incidents as classified by Florida regulations include expected client death, altercations such as the confrontation between the patient and another member of the community, injury of the client, suicide attempt by the client, non-violent crime arrest as well as missing competent adult among others. In the case of expected death, a report of Death should be initiated by the Medical case manager and forwarded to the State office (Kelly et al., 2016). Moreover, in the case of a missing competent adult, the service provider has the responsibility to report the person missing within 8 hours to the law enforcement and or the regional field office.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each country and state have their regulatory mechanisms of incident reporting process. Florida also embraces the need to encourage incident reporting within acute settings such as hospitals to improve the safety of the clients in any given health facility.

References

Kelly, N., Blake, S., & Plunkett, A. (2016). Learning from excellence in healthcare: a new approach to incident reporting. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 101(9), 788-791. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2015-310021