A STANDARD SET OF TERMS FOR CRITICAL INCIDENT RECORDING

The Anaesthetic Specialty Working Group of the Clinical Terms Project has been creating clinical terms for inclusion in the Read clinical cl assification. It is the intention to include terms to describe critica l incidents. Many difficulties were encountered and these are discusse d. The current definitions of a critical incident in the anaesthetic l iterature are too wide to allow a circumscribed set of terms to be gen erated. The interpretation of a critical incident is not only subjecti ve but also requires a great deal of contextual information to describ e it accurately. A method of critical incident reporting using the ter ms that will be contained within the enhanced Read clinical classifica tion is proposed. These terms may be useful in the construction of a n ationwide critical incident register.