Attitudes to causes of failure to report service errors

This article seeks to explore the attitudes and beliefs of healthcare staff relating to the causes and reporting of medication errors in UK hospitals. Exploratory descriptive qualitative design, a focus group of six senior nurses took part (with ICU nurses, medical assessment and senior nurses) was used as the method of data collection. A focus group discussion was digitally recorded and transcribed. Transcriptions of the interviews were analysed using the Framework Analysis (Ritchie and Spencer, 1994). Five key themes emerged from the data, these were: poor quality of feedback; enduring culture of blame; fear factor (divided into: lack of knowledge, hierarchy and historical, power and confidence); need for protection (divided into: need protect myself, professional responsibility and from litigation); and professional culture. Participants indicated they would report medication errors frequently if they have timely feedback, reduce blame culture effect from organisation and if they have more open discussion between variant medical culture medics and nurses. The study reveals the attitudes and beliefs of healthcare staff relating to reporting medical errors which decrease their ability to report however, they still do report for different causes suchm as professional responsibility (senior nurses) and fear from litigation