From Reporting to Avoiding Incidents

An incident is a kind of “event” that occurs when something unplanned and unforeseen happens in relation to the health, safety or welfare of a resident. Reporting is the next step following any incident type contributing to quality assurance and development of the residents’ health. But only to a smaller extent does it help prevent or reduce the number of incidents that happen, as these are a part of the natural ways of working – in a very busy environment.

What really contributes here is changing the way you work, enriching every transaction with information to support the care staff involved.

Regulation 18: Notification of other incidents

CQC owns the regulatory body to ”specify a range of events or occurrences that must be notified to CQC so that, where needed, CQC can take follow-up action”. Meaning that providers must notify CQC of all incidents that affect the health, safety and welfare of their service users.

Read the full list of incidents here.

But how does this reporting instrument satisfy the kind of rehabilitative thinking that supports a service to become outstanding?

No matter how well-meaning the regulation may be, it relies on an almost unnatural ability not to fear the potential prosecution following reporting of any kind of incident. Another way of dealing with incidents could just as well be not to report them handling those situations locally, to avoid further regulatory action. As such the good intentions of the regulation may be lost, and the statistics are not showing us if a) or b) happens.

Best practice: reporting an incident