Nature and type of patient-reported safety incidents at a tertiary hospital in South Africa during the COVID-19 period (2018-2021)- A retrospective review.

The healthcare sector in South Africa has seen a rise in medical errors and negligence adversely affecting healthcare delivery. This study aimed to determine the nature and magnitude of Patient Safety Incidents at a tertiary hospital between April 2018 to March 2021 (the COVID-19 era). A retrospective review of Patient Safety Incidents forms and clinical records of inpatients above 12 years with a reported incident were included. The overall incidence of patient safety incidents was 4.40 PSIs per 10 000 patient-days. The majority of PSIs were harmful incidents (An incident that results in harm to a patient that is related to medical management, in contrast to disease complications or underlying disease) at 72.50% [145/200], followed by no harm incidents at 18.00% [36/200] and 9.50% [19/200] near-miss incidents. The five highest incident types were clinical process/procedure [83/200; 41.50%], behaviour [49/200; 24.50%], falls [28/200; 14%], complications [20/200; 10%], and pressure sores [11/200; 5.50%]. Incidents occurred more frequently within the week (83.50%) and during day shift (67.50%). Overall, the study showed low PSI reporting rates which is an inherent challenge with voluntary reporting. Notably, there has been an increasing trend in reporting. The results reflect a reporting culture more inclined to bring awareness to incidents that have negative outcomes.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Singh, Mahomed. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)