THE AUSTRALIAN INCIDENT MONITORING STUDY - AN ANALYSIS OF 2000 INCIDENT REPORTS

The Australian Patient Safety Foundation was formed in 1987, it was de cided to set up and co-ordinate the Australian Incident Monitoring Stu dy as a function of this Foundation, 90 hospitals and practices joined the study. Participating anaesthetists were invited to report, on an anonymous and voluntary basis, any unintended incident which reduced, or could have reduced, the safety margin for a patient. Any incident c ould be reported, not only those which were deemed ''preventable'' or were thought to involve human error The Mark I AIMS form was developed which incorporated features and concepts from several other studies. All the incidents in this symposium were reported using this form, whi ch contains general instructions to the reporter, key words and space for a narrative of the incident, structured sections for what happened (with subsections for circuitry incidents, circuitry involved, equipm ent involved, pharmacological incidents and airway incidents), why it happened (with subsections for factors contributing to the incident, f actors minimising the incident and suggested corrective strategies), t he type of anaesthesia and procedure, monitors in use, when and where the incident happened, the experience of the personnel involved, patie nt age and a classification of patient outcome. Enrolment, reporting a nd data-handling procedures are described. Data on patient outcome are presented; this is correlated with the stages at which the incident o ccurred and with the ASA status of the patients. The locations at whic h the incidents occurred and the types of procedures, the sets of inci dents analysed in detail and a breakdown of the incidents due to drugs are also presented. The pattern and relative frequencies of the vario us categories of incidents are similar to those in ''closed-claims'' s tudies, suggesting that AIMS should provide information of relevance t o those wishing to develop strategies to reduce the incidence and/or i mpact of incidents and accidents.