Copenhagen’s plan to end patient safety incident reporting system condemned as backward

The Danish government wants to abolish healthcare professionals' obligation to report unintentional incidents with patients, a system that has existed for 20 years and is still considered a success.

In its recent budget proposal for 2025, the Danish coalition government repeals the 20-year-old obligation for healthcare workers to report “unintentional incidents” to municipalities and regions, which then anonymise these reports and register them in the Danish Patient Safety Database.

The decision has sent shockwaves through the Danish health community since the system is considered effective.

“Yes, it is a success. The obligation to report errors has created a culture of patient safety that has led to more errors and cases being reported and learned from during the years,” Annette Wandel, Deputy Director at the Danish Patients Association, told Euractiv. She is afraid that the budget proposal would undermine this.

The move, which will also close the national database, is a part of the government’s de-bureaucratisation ambition to cut the number of civil servants in Denmark.

The Danish Nurses’ Association considers the implementation would send Denmark back 20 years.

“It is unique in Denmark that we have created a system where employees can safely report errors to prevent the same errors from happening again,” Harun Demirtas, deputy chairman of the Danish Nurses' Council, told TV 2.

Camilla Rathcke, chairwoman of the Danish Medical Association, called it a bombshell: “Improving patient safety through learning is an ongoing process - it's not something the health system will stop. If you want patient safety and a learning healthcare system."

She added: "It makes no sense to close the database. On the contrary, more effort should be put into learning from its data,” she told the union newspaper Ugeskrift for Laeger.

Read full story

Source: EURACTIV, 18 September 2024