[17 years of the critical incident reporting and learning system "jeder-fehler-zaehlt.de" for primary care: Analysis of reports]

Background: The topic of patient safety has been a subject of much discussion since the end of the last millennium. Ensuring patient safety is a central challenge in health care. An important tool to raise awareness for and learn from adverse events and thus promote patient safety are error-reporting and learning systems (Critical Incident Reporting System = CIRS).

Methods: More than 17 years after its establishment, the CIRS "jeder-fehler-zaehlt.de" (JFZ) for German primary care has undergone a revision in terms of content and technology. The revised web-based system can be used for reporting as well as for classifying and analyzing incident reports. During this process, a descriptive analysis of the current report inventory was carried out, with a focus on serious medication errors. This included all 781 valid incident reports received between September 2004 and December 2021.

Results: In 576 of the 781 reports (73.8%), the GP practice was directly involved in the critical incident. Among error types, process errors predominated (79.8% of the classifications, 99.1% of the reports) compared with knowledge and skills errors (20.2% of the classifications, 39.7% of the reports). Communication errors (63.0%) were the most common contributing factor to critical incidents, followed by flaws in tasks and measures (39.7%). Serious and permanent patient harm was rarely reported (8.3% of the reports), whereas temporary patient harm was more common (40.3% of the reports). Incident reports about medication errors with at least serious patient harm included, in particular, substances that affected blood clotting, corticosteroids, and opiates.

Discussion: Our results complement the rates that are reported internationally for error types, patient harm, and contributing factors. Serious but preventable adverse events, so-called never events, are frequently associated with the medication process in both JFZ reports and the literature.

Conclusion: Critical incident reporting systems cannot provide accurate information about the frequency of errors in health care, but they can offer important insights into, for example, serious medication errors. Therefore, they offer both employees and healthcare institutions an opportunity for individual and institutional learning.