ANALYSIS OF NURSES' EXPERIENCE AND FACTORS INFLUENCING VOLUNTARY REPORTING OF INCIDENTS

Abstract

Relevance: Medical errors or incidents are a serious problem in global healthcare. These errors can occur at any stage of patient care, including diagnostic measures. Incident reporting plays an important role in ensuring the quality of healthcare, provided appropriate measures and actions are taken. Objective: Analysis of scientific information aimed at studying the experience of nurses in relation to voluntary incident reporting, as well as finding out the factors that influence their decision to make such reports. Search strategy: This paper presents a literature review from Pubmed, Elsiever, Medline and Google Scholar sources for the last 10 years from January 2012 to December 2022. The reviewed articles were published in English. Results: In total, 56 articles were included in this review. An ongoing comparative approach was used to analyze and combine the results of relevant studies in order to describe the experience of nurses with regard to voluntary incident reporting. The voluntary incident report is presented by three main themes: nurses' beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes towards voluntary incident reporting; factors contributing to voluntary incident reporting, and factors preventing voluntary incident reporting. The results of this study showed that the nurses did not have the most favorable impressions of the incident report. Their negative experience was reinforced by systemic, administrative and organizational factors that focused on the guilt of the staff and were characterized by a non-supportive, accusatory and punitive approach to error management. Conclusions: This review summarizes existing knowledge and highlights important areas for the future development of nursing practice focusing on the need to strengthen efforts within the organization to increase awareness, recognition and support of nurses in voluntary error reporting. Nursing managers should pay attention and invest in improving institutional approaches to error management in order to create an open and fair patient safety culture that promotes a positive attitude of nurses to voluntary error reports.