Almost 80,000 ‘incidents’ reported in SA public hospitals including wrong surgery and fatal falls
From fatal falls to medication errors, SA’s public hospitals have recorded a staggering amount of incidents and it’s only getting worse as patient numbers soar.
Public hospital “incidents” are on the rise with almost 80,000 reported over 12 months, ranging from catastrophic failures causing deaths to thousands of near misses.
Falls, medication errors and hospital acquired complications are all on the rise, repeating a pattern from previous years.
SA Health has just released its Patient Safety Report for the 2023 financial year. It shows reports of incidents have doubled in the past decade, partly fuelled by staff being encouraged to report all incidents including minor ones, in an effort to learn from the situation and avoid it occurring again.
The data shows there were 78,806 incident reported, up from 76,989 the previous 12 months.
These included five sentinel events causing “serious harm or deaths” – four medication blunders and one case where the wrong surgery was performed on a patient.
Previous sentinel events in SA have included multiple cases of foreign objects being left inside patients after surgery, while nationally there have been multiple cases of surgeons operating on the wrong patient, the wrong part of a patient and performing the wrong surgical procedure.
There were 17,530 falls recorded, including 157 causing significant harm or death, but the majority caused “no harm”.
This was up from 16,002 the previous year, which itself was a 23 per cent jump on a year earlier. The vast majority involved patients aged over 65.
There were 13,125 medication errors, up from 12,399 a year earlier, such as prescribing or administering the wrong medicine or giving the wrong dose, with the most common mistakes involving insulin, paracetamol and olanzapine.
Hospital acquired complications jumped 5 per cent to 6699, the most common being catching pneumonia while a patient.
The almost 80,000 incidents reported comes from a huge and growing patient load – in 2022-23 there were 597,866 arrivals at emergency departments, 464,547 inpatient admissions and 1,846,965 outpatient appointments.
SA Health says learning from incidents and near misses and sharing improvements that prevent harm is essential to create and maintain a safe, high-quality health service.
“Staff work hard to provide safe, high-quality care to patients and consumers accessing our health services every day,” SA Health says.
“There are times that a patient’s experience or outcome is not to the high standard we strive for, at these times it is even more important that we partner with patients, carers and the community.
“Feedback, good or bad, is encouraged and documented, ensuring adequate care and follow up for individuals and feedback for staff.
“Complaints are investigated with a quality improvement focus to identify opportunities for learning and change.
“While many incidents do not cause significant harm to patients, they provide rich information to prevent harm to patients in the future.”
Originally published as Almost 80,000 ‘incidents’ reported in SA public hospitals including wrong surgery and fatal falls
