Exploring health care professionals' perceptions of incidents and incident reporting in rehabilitation settings.
The limitations of standard incident reporting systems have been well documented. This interview study investigated health care providers' perceptions of safety events and incident reporting in rehabilitation centers. Researchers asked participants whether hypothetical scenarios constituted safety problems that they would report. Participants were more likely to report events with severe harm to patients, events classified as critical incidents, and events within their own scopes of practice. The authors suggest that interprofessional team training to enhance safety culture could improve reporting, as has been shown in other care settings. This study did not include patient perspectives, which might have brought to light other possible interventions, as suggested in a past AHRQ WebM&M perspective.