Patient safety -- mission for the future: The importance of Critical Incident Reporting Systems (CIRS) in clinical practice

Abstract

Every day patients experience harm due to errors and complications. To improve this situation, patient safety is increasingly becoming important in the treatment process. One aspect to increase patient safety is the Critical Incident Reporting System (CIRS). Observers and members of the care team are given the opportunity to anonymously report critical incidents and thus allow an analysis by an evaluation team. The goal is not to sanction the behavior of an individual, but to identify particular structural and organizational sources of error and to derive improvements.