Patient-reported safety indicators: Questions set and data collection guidance (OECD, December 2019)

Summary

Patient safety remains one of the most pressing health issues for public awareness and further policy action.

Since 2006, OECD’s Health Care Quality and Outcomes (HCQO) Working Party (WP) has developed patient safety indicators (PSIs) based on administrative data sources. These data have been regularly collected and reported with an aim of assessing and comparing cross-country differences in patient safety. However, the international comparability of existing PSIs is challenging due to a number of methodological variations in measure implementation, for example, how countries record diagnoses and procedures, define hospital admissions, processes for reporting safety events. Consequently, in some cases, higher adverse event rates may signal more developed patient safety monitoring systems and a stronger patient safety culture rather than worse care. Current PSIs have limitations in that they fail to adequately capture important aspects of patient safety, such as the extent to which health care practices to prevent and address safety incidents are implemented. 

This report summarises activities undertaken to date as part of the international indicator development on patient-reported experiences of safety and also a set of questions to be used for the pilot data collection of patient-reported experience of safety, guidelines for the pilot data collection and ongoing pilot data collection