Abstract
Objective
To determine the types of patient safety incidents and associated harm in nuclear medicine practice.
Methods
This study included 147 patient safety incidents related to nuclear medicine practice and submitted to the incident reporting system of a tertiary care nuclear medicine department between 2014 and 2019.
Results
The top-three incident types according to the International Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS) were medication/IV fluids (36/147, 24.5%), clinical administration (28/147, 19.0%), and clinical process/procedure (27/147, 18.4%), altogether comprising 61.9% of incidents. Within the medication/IV fluids domain, half of incident subtypes were attributable to supply/ordering, omitted medicine or dose, and wrong dose/strength of frequency. Within the clinical administration domain, appointment and wrong patient represented the majority of incident subtypes. Within the clinical process/procedure domain, the majority of incident subtypes fell in the categories: specimens/results and incomplete/inadequate. There was no patient harm in 145 (98.6%) of cases, mild patient harm in 1 (0.7%) case, and in 1 (0.7%) case, it remained unclear if there was patient harm. In 4 (2.7%) cases, a Prevention Recovery Information System for Monitoring and Analysis evaluation was performed because of the high risk of reoccurrence and patient harm.
Conclusions
The majority of patient safety incidents in nuclear medicine occur in three main ICPS categories (medication/IV fluids, clinical administration, and clinical process/procedure, in order of decreasing frequency). These can be considered as key strategic areas for incident prevention and patient safety improvement. Nevertheless, the rate of actual patient harm was very low in our series.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 1111-1116 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Nuclear Medicine Communications |
Volume | 41 |
Issue number | 11 |
Early online date | 4-Aug-2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Nov-2020 |
Keywords
- medical errors
- nuclear medicine
- patient safety
- quality of healthcare
- INTERNATIONAL CLASSIFICATION
- RADIOLOGY
- INCIDENTS
- QUALITY
- EVENTS
- ERRORS