Almost 1,000 adverse incidents involving patient care are occurring in Irish hospitals every week, new figures show.
The figures, which include both major and minor incidents, ranging from slips, trips and falls to medication and treatment errors, are collated by the State Claims Agency and show that some 77,174 adverse events were reported to it by hospitals over a 21-month period from January 1st, 2004 to September 30th, 2006.
That is the equivalent of 918 adverse incidents being reported every week over the period. However, this figure is regarded as a significant underestimate of the true position because not all hospitals were feeding data into the national incident reporting system until the end of June 2006.
The system was piloted at 10 hospitals in the early part of 2004 and its national roll-out commenced in September 2004. The roll-out of the STARSWeb national incident reporting system has only recently been completed at public hospitals and community healthcare facilities.
Each hospital or facility feeds data on adverse incidents and near misses into the system via computer and only has access to its own data. But the State Claims Agency has access to all the information and will generate quarterly reports on the aggregated data from the beginning of next year.
Dr Ailish Quinlan, head of the clinical indemnity scheme at the agency, said yesterday it would be the end of next year before there is a full year's data on adverse incidents in all facilities. She added that the majority of the 77,174 incidents reported to date were minor in nature, did not involve acute personal injury and did not result in hospitals being sued.
The number of compensation claims lodged with the agency to date in respect of adverse incidents is 1,663. A quarter of these relate to surgical events. Some of the claims relate to patient deaths.
Of the 77,174 incidents reported to the end of September, 33,075 related to slips, trips and falls by patients; 6,840 were classified as medication incidents, which range from medication being missed or given at the wrong time to the wrong drugs being given; 5,862 fell into the category of violence or aggression by patients on each other; 5,752 were treatment incidents; and 4,211 involved patients absconding, which includes patients wandering and children absconding from residential facilities. Other incidents included problems with medical records and documents; diagnosis; infection control; events just before and after birth; blood transfusion; and confidentiality.
Some 28,415 of the incidents occurred between January and September this year. Again the majority of these - some 40 per cent - were slips, trips and falls.
Responding to the figures, the Health Service Executive (HSE) said that while the vast majority of the incidents did not involve patient harm, they were nonetheless important as they provided lessons for the HSE when it set out to minimise risk.
It added that it placed a top priority on patient safety and had recently appointed a head of quality and risk, "to set up the systems and processes necessary to improve safety and quality within the health services".
It also said it was actively considering the need to establish a patient safety agency. Fine Gael and Labour are calling for the establishment of such an agency .