Under the National Treasury Management Agency (Amendment) Act 2000 there is a statutory requirement for all State authorities including the HSE and its funded agencies to report adverse incidents promptly to the State Claims Agency (SCA) and to facilitate any subsequent investigation. This allows the HSE in conjunction with the SCA to identify and analyse developing trends and patterns and to develop and implement risk mitigation strategies.
Considerable work has been undertaken in the first six months of 2015 in the roll out the new National Incident Management System (NIMS). At the end of June 2015, the former ‘STARsWeb’ system was ‘switched off’. NIMS is now the national (and only mandated) platform for reporting incidents. It provides a powerful reporting tool that supports incident investigation, tracking of recommendations from investigations and analysis of adverse event trends, all of which should inform the risk strategies of each health service organisation.
In terms of the quality of data;
- This is supported by the NIMS intelligent interview entry forms, incorporating specific questioning and picklists, along with mandatory field validations which are designed to standardise reporting across the health sector. This will also lead to improvement in data quality.
- Certain NIMS information is automatically generated by the system through built in algorithms. An example of this is the "severity rating" which is based on the injury outcome. This algorithm follows the Impact table for clinical and non clinical incidents, which is set out in the HSE’s Safety Incident Management Policy, and results in the generation of an objective, system-driven "severity rating".
- NIMS provides the capability for the user to conduct a risk investigation and update the injury outcome as appropriate, allowing for a reclassification of the system generated "severity rating".
- The State Claims Agency, as the host of NIMS, has also established a data services section which monitors the quality of data on NIMS on an ongoing basis.
As part of NIMS, a new taxonomy consistent with the World Health Organisation taxonomy was introduced to facilitate more consistent reporting. The benefits of this will be seen as the system becomes the established reporting tool for both serious and less serious incidents.
As part of the roll out programme for NIMS, almost 700 people have been trained to enter incidents on the system. Further training is currently underway to allow each service produce reports on its own data.
