Life happens in moments. What seems small can be significant, what seems substantial can become an afterthought. Whatever form these moments take, in health, care and support services, they speak to the reality of the experience for the person utilising the service. These moments, or as they are more commonly known ‘incidents’ and ‘accidents’ can be incredibly illustrative. Our ability to understand, record and review these ‘incidents’ has a direct impact on the quality of life for the people supported, the people supporting, and everyone else involved in the service. It is from this baseline of understanding that we can begin to build our responses. By learning from previous experiences to establish proactive and preventative processes.
What is an incident?
In health and social care, an incident refers to any unintended or unexpected event that could have or did lead to harm for one or more individuals receiving care or support, team members, or the organisation itself. Which is quite a broad definition! This includes both clinical and non-clinical events. Ranging from medication errors, falls or behavioural events, to breaches of confidentiality or equipment failures.
The impact of incidents can be profound. Physically, individuals may suffer injury, deterioration in health, or delayed recovery. Mentally, the impact can reach even further. Health and care are intrinsically human experiences from every perspective. Anyone involved in the incident may experience anxiety, loss of trust, or trauma. Research by NHS England highlights that unresolved incidents can lead to long-term psychological effects such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in both patients and healthcare professionals.
Effective incident management is therefore essential. Prompt reporting, thorough investigation, and transparent communication are key to safeguarding individuals and maintaining public confidence. The NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) emphasises learning from incidents to prevent recurrence and improve care quality.
Information is at the heart of preventative care and support. Information attained by care and support workers every day. The proper recording, reviewing and response to incidents can be transformational for service quality and outcomes.
Common challenges with incident management at the point of care
Quality incident management is a benefit in all care and support settings. However, there are a range of challenges facing providers on this front as well. In the moment of an incident, the natural priority falls on addressing it, rather than recording it. For example, take a fall. You want to immediately support the person who fell. So you can begin recording the information about the fall and the person’s condition, rather than what caused it. This is one of the key reasons why underreporting of incidents remains a challenge for providers.
Some of this information is highly person as well. Which means you need to record it as confidential. Something that is not always a fluid criteria to apply and switch between when using paper, or standalone systems.
In fact, standalone systems can also counterintuitively replicate the issues of disconnection that exist with paper-based systems. When the information is siloed, as in a standalone system, it can be difficult to connect it back to the support you are providing. Which makes the vital incident management you are doing ineffective for driving improved outcomes for the people being supported.
Ultimately, this can reduce the purpose of incident management amongst your team. When people can’t see the benefits of their actions or understand the ‘why?’ of their efforts, enthusiasm drops. With so much to do already, the value of incident management becomes lost in the shuffle of siloed information.
Incidents in action with care & support providers
At Nourish we’ve been working closely with our customers to develop a new Incident Management solution. One which puts the person supported at the heart of the process. Offering an efficient, easy to use solution for event logging at the point of care and beyond, to escalation and management. Creating a clear throughline of events that is easy to develop, manage and learn from. We spoke to Anna Goscombe, Director of Quality & Therapeutic Services at IBC Healthcare, about their experience helping us to develop this new product.
“For a whole host of reasons, [our] incident detail wasn’t good enough. Or sometimes it was delayed because information was siloed on different platforms. This all meant you couldn’t rely completely on the accuracy of the data. Or you couldn’t respond quick enough. So again, for all those reasons Nourish improves the quality of service that we’re providing to the person we support because we’ve got a better handle and a better management of incidents. We can better map the trends.
“What I mean when I say map trends, is that we can really understand the full picture. For example, ‘what might be the triggers here for this person?’ or ‘Is it specifically happening in the home? Is it specifically in the community where most incidents are occurring?’
“For example, you can see how many restrictive physical interventions there have been. You can check important factors like if any restraints were used. We can then review previous data and see there were three restraints this month. But there was none for the last two months. Clearly something’s happened.”
This level of detail unlocks whole new worlds of insight for you to share across your service and community.
Preventative, quality care and support
Prevention is born of proactivity, and effective proactivity is beholden to accurate information. With quality incident reporting IBC are able to better understand the needs of their community. The specific point on restraints can be folded into the wider comprehension of that person’s experience. Their diet, their interests, their sleep pattern, all vital updates of experience that help your team notice trends.
These trends hold the key to providing preventative, quality care and support. As Anna explained to us.
“It is crucial we can notice those things and be able to record triggers like that when providing LD and mental health services. It’s important to do it, but also important to do it in a in a timely manner. Local authorities, placing authorities, commissioners, they all expect it. They expect us to analyse that sort of data, but also to foresee any potential risk or escalation in incidents.
“More than that, we expect it of ourselves. Understanding incidents, even something as basic as that can potentially prevent a hospital readmission, or discharge to another service or staff burnout.”
Keeping teams and communities together can be incredibly challenging in modern care and support environments. Quality incident management can help you meet this challenge. Of course, as always, the success will be determined by the people involved.
An empowering learning culture
It should be obvious by now how important your team members are to this process. They will be the ones at the coalface of this process. It is vital that your care and support teams play an active role in incident management and reporting. One where they can see directly the benefits of their effort and take pride in the positive outcomes they deliver. This cannot be achieved without a positive, reinforcing learning culture.
The PSIRF advises a move away from blame and towards understanding the root causes of incidents. Whether they stem from human error, systemic issues, or gaps in training. The focus on addressing the issue, rather than punishing the cause. With a collaborative and an intuitive, user-friendly system you can engage your team and engender their sense of pride. This adds a tangible personal impact to the weight of their daily workload. Naturally, effective incident management takes time and practise to establish. It’s important to appreciate that everyone has an influential part to play to get it right.
Something exciting this way comes
‘Incidents’ and ‘accidents’ are broad terms for a wealth of specific events. Each one of these events, from the small to the substantial, help you better understand your service, and the community it supports. The accuracy and availability of this information trickles through to every other area. Showering the relevant parties with the information they need. Whether they’re at the point of delivery or in the back office. A single stumble can reflect a worsening trend. A quiet smile can reveal a forgotten passion. Every slip can inform your next step, and every step forward will empower your community.
Learn more about how Nourish can help you make the most of every ‘incident’ you have with our upcoming incident management system; Nourish Safety, there isn’t a moment to lose.
