Characterization of Drug-Related Critical Incidents from Multiple Settings in the Critical Incident Reporting System North Rhine-Westphalia

Abstract: Introduction: Incident reporting systems have been implemented in health care for over a decade and contain reports of critical incidents (CI). These must be analyzed in order to suggest, implement and evaluate solutions for minimizing the risk of future CIs to occur, thereby increasing patient safety. Drug-related CIs (DRCI) are one type of CI which may represent up to 1/3rd of all CIs, therefore this CI-type is characterized in this study. Aim: To categorize and characterize DRCIs reported in the Critical Incident Reporting System North Rhine-Westphalia (CIRS-NRW). Materials & Methods: In this explorative, retrospective, descriptive study, 553 reports from the CIRS-NRW, reported between the 1st of January 2019 and the 15th of September 2021, were analyzed. These were categorized by setting, medication use process stage, ATC-code, patient age and look-alike, sound-alike (LASA), and then analyzed via descriptive statistics. Various subgroup analyses were also conducted. Results: DRCIs occurred mostly in the hospital (48,5%) and pharmacy (40,7%) settings, during the prescribing (33,8%) and administration (33,5%) of drugs and the ATC-codes N02 (9,4%), B01 (6,9%) and N05 (5,4%) were commonly involved. Patient age contained >50% missing data and LASA was involved in 16,5% of DRCIs. Subgroups were often small, likely resulting in low statistical power. Conclusion: By successfully characterizing the DRCIs, some potential areas of improvement for reducing future DRCIs were highlighted, however there are many more variables of relevance for patient safety than those analyzed in this study, underlining the need for further studies characterizing more DRCIs including additional variables.