Incident reporting

Health Management Glossary

Patient Safety

Definition. Incident reporting is the systematic collection of reports about patient safety incidents, including errors, near misses and adverse events, so that organisations can learn from them.

Explanation

Reporting systems may be voluntary or mandatory, local or national, and confidential or anonymous. Leape (2002) argued that their value lies in analysis and response rather than in counting reports, and that reporters need protection and feedback.

Macrae (2016) shows that many systems collect far more reports than they can investigate and that report numbers say more about reporting culture than about safety. Effective systems concentrate on learning, feed back what changed and are combined with other sources such as record review and trigger tools.

Related concepts

Adverse event Near miss Patient safety culture Root cause analysis (RCA) Global Trigger Tool

Read on The Health Topics

• Patient Safety Systems and Digital Health Integration
• Workplace Ostracism: An Introduction (101)
• The Safety Case: An Introduction (101)
• Performance and Quality Management in an Oncology Hospital: From KPI to Management Decision
• Collectivism’s Impact on Safety Reporting Intention
• Global Trigger Tool vs. Voluntary Reporting in Adverse Event Detection

References

Leape, L. L. (2002). Reporting of adverse events. New England Journal of Medicine, 347(20), 1633–1638.

Macrae, C. (2016). The problem with incident reporting. BMJ Quality & Safety, 25(2), 71–75.

Cite this entry: Kurutkan, M. N. (2026). Incident reporting. In The Health Topics glossary. https://healthtopic.org/glossary/incident-reporting/

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