Ten years of incident reports on in-hospital cardiac arrest – Are they useful for improvements?

Abstract

ObjectivesStaff in hospitals are encouraged to write up incident reports whenever they notice an incident. There are few published compilations of these reports from an in-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) perspective. AimTo describe content of incident reports over ten years in a two-sited university hospital in order to share knowledge and thereby being able to improve resuscitation systems in hospitals. Material and methodsAll incident reports between 2010–June 2023 written at Karolinska University Hospital contain the words “CPR”, “cardiac arrest”, “resuscitation”, Do-Not–attend-CPR” (DNACPR), “life-sustaining treatment” were included for analysis. Reports were grouped into larger themes. ResultsIn all 588 reports was identified automatically by the hospitals system based on the totally selected keywords. The largest category was “Life-sustaining treatment” with 178 (30%) reports and thereafter “Preventing care” (117, 20%) and “Material” (80, 14%). ConclusionOur hospital has clearly valued incident reports as a mean to track on-going issues and serious events over time as well as a source to trigger educational interventions. To improve patient safety, a standardized approach for compilation of reports and actions would be helpful when sharing knowledge between hospitals and with the resuscitation community.