Citation

Wright M, Parker G. J. Qual. Clin. Pract. 1998; 18(4): 249-261.

Affiliation

Academic Psychiatry, Royal North Shore Hospital, St Leonards, NSW, Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998, Australian Council on Healthcare Standards and the Australian Medical Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9862662

Abstract

Critical Incident Monitoring (CIM) as an instrument of quality assurance (QA) has received increasing attention in recent years. The present study was developed to explore a potential role for CIM in QA for clinical psychiatry. A questionnaire was sent to psychiatrists and requested retrospective reporting of clinical incidents, and a pilot study of an inpatient-based incident reporting system was performed. All Fellows of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry (RANZCP) were sent a questionnaire. Eight psychiatric inpatient services were invited to participate in the pilot study. The returns of the questionnaires were aggregated and analysed to reveal a relatively small number of separate incident types, with little difference between the 'adverse outcome' and 'near-miss' categories. Similar results were found with the pilot study. It was concluded that the development of a unified incident reporting system for use by psychiatric clinicians and psychiatric services may add usefully to existing quality improvement processes.

Language: en