The Australian Incident Monitoring Study: An Analysis of 2000 Incident Reports

TLDR

The Australian Patient Safety Foundation established the Australian Incident Monitoring Study in 1987, recruiting 90 hospitals and practices to systematically record patient safety incidents. Anaesthetists voluntarily reported all unintended incidents using the Mark I AIMS form, which includes structured sections for event details, contributing factors, corrective strategies, and patient demographics, with enrolment and data‑handling procedures defined. Analysis of the reports shows that patient outcomes correlate with incident stage and ASA status, and that incident patterns and frequencies mirror those of closed‑claims studies, supporting AIMS as a useful tool for developing safety strategies.

Abstract

The Australian Patient Safety Foundation was formed in 1987; it was decided to set up and co-ordinate the Australian Incident Monitoring Study 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 could 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, which 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, equipment involved, pharmacological incidents and airway incidents), why it happened (with subsections for factors contributing to the incident, factors minimising the incident and suggested corrective strategies), the type of anaesthesia and procedure, monitors in use, when and where the incident happened, the experience of the personnel involved, patient age and a classification of patient outcome. Enrolment, reporting and data-handling procedures are described. Data on patient outcome are presented; this is correlated with the stages at which the incident occurred and with the ASA status of the patients. The locations at which the incidents occurred and the types of procedures, the sets of incidents analysed in detail and a breakdown of the incidents due to drugs are also presented. The pattern and relative frequencies of the various categories of incidents are similar to those in “closed-claims” studies, suggesting that AIMS should provide information of relevance to those wishing to develop strategies to reduce the incidence and/or impact of incidents and accidents.