Healthcare accidents are inevitable despite healthcare workers’ best efforts to prevent incidents. Unfortunately, some of these mishaps can result in injury, compromised safety, and other serious consequences.
Completing compliance incident reports is crucial to reducing the number of accidents in the future and understanding why they occur. Understanding what incidents need reporting and how to complete an incident report can help providers, compliance officers, and other personnel maintain the highest safety standards.
What is a Compliance Incident Report?
A compliance incident report documents any occurrence, situation, or condition that disrupts work or harms employees. Even if no harm results, the potential for it still requires reporting.
Incident reports are crucial to maintaining compliance in healthcare and should be part of an organization’s risk management plan. Documentation makes it easier to identify patterns of noncompliance and protects all personnel from environmental and procedural hazards.
Even when an incident wasn’t unexpected or didn’t cause harm, it’s essential to report it. Without proper documentation, prevention will be more challenging in the future. A compliance incident report also highlights necessary corrections or improvements to current processes or compliance training.
Finally, instead of viewing incident reports in punitive terms, it’s more helpful to view them as part of perpetuating a culture of safety. Filing a report empowers employees to identify areas for improvement and promote professional growth. Also, one of the best lessons from an incident report is improving the steps to ensure staff compliance in nursing and other realms of healthcare.
What Incidents Require Reporting?
People file reports for many types of incidents, varying in severity levels. The following are the most common types of compliance incidents that warrant reporting:
- Workplace injury or illness
- Workplace violence
- Patient safety issue
- Improper use or disclosure of protected health information (PHI)
- Hacking or phishing incidents
- Fraud, waste, or abuse
How to File a Compliance Incident Report
An incident report must include all details about the accident, including all contributing factors and outcomes. A thorough compliance incident report form should consist of as many of the following elements as possible:
- Date and time of the incident
- Type of incident and a detailed description
- Exactly where it occurred
- Names of individuals affected by the event
- Name of all witnesses
- Statement of the events from each witness
- Injuries, damage, or other harms sustained
- Photo evidence of the incident
All incident reports should be compiled in a way that is easy for decision-makers, health organization board members, compliance officers, and other personnel to read and comprehend. Today’s technology has also made the reporting process much more streamlined.
Many private practices, healthcare organizations, and hospitals turn to companies that provide guidance on generating standard reporting forms and protocols. In addition to recommending a compliance incident report template, they can offer incident reporting software that makes the documentation process more efficient and less time-consuming.
Learn about incident reporting software and other tools and resources from Compliancy Group to help you stay updated on compliance requirements. Instead of reacting to incidents, let Compliancy Group help you maintain a proactive approach to staying compliant and maintaining safety for everyone.
