72,554 hospital errors reported

SOME 72,554 instances of error, near misses and "clinical incidents"were reported in public hospitals in a one-year period, according to a report published yesterday.

The report notes the majority of all incidents (84.6 per cent) were minor in nature, and mainly reported by nursing staff.

It was published by the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) and was commissioned also by the HSE and the State Claims Agency.

The report involves an evaluation study of the internet-based incident reporting system for public hospitals, Starsweb.

Basing its analysis on a sample of 382 incidents from 2005-2006 it finds the most significantly reported incidents were trips and falls, which accounted for 39 per cent of the total. Extrapolating from these figures this would amount to 28,296 trips and falls in a year nationally .

"Medication incidents (11 per cent) were the next most significant classification" - amounting to 7,980. The highest proportion of these (4,229) arose in general medicine. The next most frequently report category was in surgery, accounting for 15 per cent of incidents, or 10,883 if extrapolated.

The report also finds the highest number of incidents occurred in August, with 45 of the 382 sampled reports occurring in the summer month.

In terms of time of day there were two distinct spikes - at 2pm and 8am, when 7.6 per cent of incidents and 6.7 per cent happened respectively.