Investigating the cost and efficiency of incident reporting in a specialist paediatric NHS hospital and impact on patient safety.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the incident reporting process (IR1s), to calculate the costs of reporting incidents in this context and to gain an indication of how economic the process was and whether it could be improved to yield better outcomes.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of a sample, 10.47% (n=150) selected from 1432 medication incident report summaries, generated at Birmingham Children's Hospital, a specialist tertiary referral paediatric centre, during 2014 and collated through the national Datix incident reporting system software was analysed and the associated staff time required to complete each step of the incident reporting process was costed.