Assessing Knowledge, Attitude and Practices Regarding Incident Reporting Among Health Workers:

Abstract

Incident reporting in health care institutions is one of the good practices in ensuring patient safety during health service provision. Some of the decisions and judgments made by health care professionals and management provide ground for unintentional harm to patients. When such errors go unreported, patient safety and quality of care is often compromised and at the same time health workers do not learn from such mistakes. In this study therefore, I set out to assess incident reporting in Kawolo General Hospital. The main objective was to assess the knowledge, attitude and current practices of incident reporting among the health workers. A cross sectional descriptive study was carried out and both the qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used. Health workers were randomly selected to represent the entire hospital. The respondents were health workers categorized as medical, nursing, allied health and pharmacy. Using simple random sampling method, 100 health workers were selected and interviewed. Self- administered questionnaires were used for a total of 100 health workers, to assess the knowledge, attitude and practices regarding incident reporting in 2014. The data collected was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Scientists and Micro Soft Excel. The chi-squares, P- values and correlations coefficients were calculated and the results presented in the tables. The results indicated that there were poor practices of incident reporting especially among the medical (9%), allied health (7%) and pharmacy (4%) categories in this hospital. The observed relationship between the knowledge of where to find incident report forms in the hospital and incident reporting at 95% level of significance was statistically significant with a p-value of 0.000. The observed relationship between the knowledge of what incidents were in the hospital and incident reporting was also statistically significant with a p- 5value of 0.004. This was attributed to lack of knowledge of the existence of incident report forms and where to find them in the hospital and lack of training about incident reporting in the hospital. The study also identified that the practices of incident reporting were more among health workers who had worked in the hospital for a period of 5-10 years. The observed relationship between the attitude towards incident reporting and the duration worked in the hospital was statistically significant with a p-value of 0.003 at 95% level of significance and the observed relationship between the state category of staffs and the practices of incident reporting was also statistically significant with a p-value of 0.014. The relationship between sex of the respondents and incident reporting at 95% level of significance was statistically significant with a p- value of 0.031. The majority of the respondents followed the age group of 22 – 38 years and the rest were in the age category of 39 – 57+ years. The mean age of the respondents was 35.28 years. The stand deviation and the range for the age of the respondents were 8.350 and 36 years respectively. On the other hand, the mean duration in service of the respondents was 2.58 years. The standard deviation and the range for the duration in service of the respondents were 0.966 and 4 years respectively. In conclusion, it was identified that there were no formal incident reporting and training about incident reporting in the hospital. This means that training should be emphasized and strategies like conducting CMEs at the hospital should be put in place to improve the practice of incident reporting in order to mitigate likely outcomes, improving on patient safety and ensuring a safety culture in the hospital.