Patient safety trends in 2022: An analysis of 256,679 serious events and incidents from the nation’s largest event reporting database (28 April 2023)

Summary

Pennsylvania is the only state that requires acute care facilities to report all events of harm or potential for harm. The Pennsylvania Patient Safety Reporting System (PA-PSRS) is the largest repository of patient safety data in the United States and one of the largest in the world, with over 4.5 million acute care event reports dating back to 2004. Herein, we examine patient safety event reports submitted to the PA-PSRS acute care database in 2022 and compare them to prior years.

The authors extracted data from PA-PSRS and obtained data from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4). Counts of reports were calculated based on report submission date, and rates were calculated based on event occurrence date and calculated per 1,000 patient days for hospitals or 1,000 surgical encounters for ambulatory surgical facilities (ASFs).

The study found there was a decrease in the number of incident reports submitted to PA-PSRS in 2022 and an increase in serious and high harm event reports.