Physicians’ and Nurses’ Attitude and Practice to incident reporting in Saint Lucia

Background: Incident reporting plays a fundamental role in enhancing patient safety by encouraging healthcare professionals’ learning from failures and inconsistencies of health care systems. A pertinent aspect of patient safety is learning from past mistakes to implement plans, to mitigate or prevent potential future occurrence of these events which is the main goal of incident reporting. Saint Lucia has been classified by the World Bank as a low-to-middle-income country (LMICs), and according to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, approximately 134 million adverse events occur each year in hospitals in LMICs, due to unsafe care, contributing to 2.6 million deaths.
Methodology: For this study the researcher applied a quantitative, descriptive design using self-administered questionnaires to obtain data. The study was conducted at the Saint Jude Hospital (the only public hospital in the south of Saint Lucia). A total of 49 doctors and nurses participated in the study resulting in a (33.33 %) response rate.
Findings: There was sufficient evidence to prove that the domain fear and motivators has an association with the frequency of use of incident reporting (p-values=0.007/0.048) and motivators (p-values=.006) respectively. When participants characteristics were assessed the study revealed that factors such as educational background (p value=0.041), working hours per week (p value=0.036) and profession (p value=0.027) was seen to have a statistically significant association with the frequency of use of incident reporting. The study also revealed a high level of awareness of incident reporting among participants, as (95.9 %) indicated that they are aware of the incident reporting system. Healthcare professionals prefer an incident reporting system that is; paper based/written (95.9%), voluntary (77.6%), with the purpose of identifying errors and learning from mistakes to improve patient safety (89.8%), one where they report all types of incidents (83.7%) and that these reports are submitted to the Head of their Unit (61.2%) and the Reporter is identified / known (73.4%).
Conclusion: Physicians and Nurses attitude toward incident reporting is heavily influenced by fear factors and are mostly encouraged by their belief that reporting will improve patient safety and help patients. There is a need for continuous training and education on incident reporting among healthcare professionals and clearly defined guidelines on what should be reported. In order to encourage reporting, management needs to create awareness and offer more support to their staff in areas of patient safety. For the purpose of flexibility and accessibility, incident reporting systems should be made electronic and web based.