CORESS reports

Summary

CORESS is an independent charity, which aims to promote safety in surgical practice in the NHS and the private sector. CORESS receives confidential incident reports from surgeons and theatre staff. These reports are analysed by the Advisory Board, who make comments and extract lessons to be learned. Aiming to educate, and avoid blame, CORESS calls on surgeons to recognise a near miss or adverse event, react by taking action to stop it happening and then report the incident to CORESS so that the lessons can be published.

The focus of CORESS is on detecting and learning from no-harm, near-miss and low harm events encountered during routine surgical practice. The programme collects reports of such events, analyses them and disseminates the learning contained within them to a wide surgical audience and other agencies involved in Patient Safety matters. These events are known collectively as ‘Accident Precursor Events’ or simply ‘Precursors’.

Content

CORESS Online reporting form Any surgeon or surgical trainee, irrespective of specialty, can submit reports in confidence. CORESS encourages all to report incidents of actual or near harm, as well as near misses, where there are lessons from which the whole community can learn. Every submission is treated in the strictest confidence and when published will never contain any clues as to its origin.

CORESS Case Database Reports are analysed, edited and anonymised by members of the CORESS Advisory Board. They are then converted into narrative reports or vignettes. These are then published in a number of widely read surgical journals, in particular RCSEd Surgeons’ News and RCSEng Annals.  The published reports are also available via the CORESS database.

CORESS Reports