Relationship Between the Likelihood of Reporting Adverse Events Among Nursing Officers and Their Perceptions on Identified Barriers and Enablers for Reporting

In order to improve patient safety in hospital setups, learning from previous errors is important. Therefore the institute should have adequate data on adverse events which have occurred in their settings. The way of gathering those data is Adverse Event Reporting. The objective of this study was to measure the relationship between the likelihood of reporting adverse events by Nursing Officers in Medical, Surgical, Paediatric, Gynaecology and Obstetrics wards in the Teaching Hospital, Kandy and their perception on selected barriers and enablers, as identified in literature, for adverse event reporting. This was a quantitative study, and the study instrument was a validated self-administered questionnaire with a six point likert scale. Nursing officers working in Medical, Surgical, Paediatric, Gynaecology and Obstetrics wards in the Teaching Hospital, Kandy were the study population. The whole population was taken to this study as it is below the calculated sample size. Correlations between the likelihood of reporting adverse events was measured with the participants’ perceptions on their training on adverse event reporting, leadership, feedback received for reported adverse events, knowledge on adverse event reporting, presence of culture of blame and the existing process of adverse event reporting. The response rate for the questionnaire was 69% (n=277).There was statistically significant positive moderate correlation between the participants’ likelihood of incident reporting and their perception on the process of reporting an adverse event (r = 0.591). Their perceptions on leadership (r = 0.472), perceived knowledge on incident reporting (r = 0.462), perception on feedback received for reported incidents (r = 0.438), perceived training received for incident reporting (r = 0.378) and the perception of the presence of culture of blame (r = 0.164) showed weak positive correlations with their likelihood of reporting adverse events. Simplification of the process of adverse event reporting can be recommended to improve incident reporting in these selected wards in the Teaching Hospital, Kandy