The effect of national and regional incident reporting systems on serious events in patient care - Protocol for a systematic review

Summary

All providers of health and social services must work systematically to reduce the risk of adverse events resulting from the provision of services or a lack of provision. Nevertheless, adverse events of varying severity occur. Norwegian health service providers are obliged to report serious incidents to the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision (the Board of Health) and The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board (NHIB).

The review is intended to inform “Varselutvalget” (the commission) in their evaluation of the incident reporting systems in the Board of Health and NHIB.

A librarian will carry out a systematic search for relevant research in bibliographic databases, using citation chaser software and directly on the websites of relevant organisations. Title, abstract and full text will be assessed against the inclusion criteria. We will use machine learning to streamline the process of selecting studies. We will extract and summarize data from the included studies and assess the risk of bias and our certainty in the results with suitable checklists and tools.  The purpose of this systematic review is to investigate the effect of national and regional incident reporting systems on serious events in patient care. We will investigate which system shows the best effect, compare the effects of systems with different characteristics (non-sanctioning, distribution of responsibility, control function and patient involvement), and report which other outcomes that are reported in these studies. The results will be presented in a report in Norwegian.