By Paul Smith
A nationwide picture of risk areas in medical practice will be made public later this year in a groundbreaking move by the medical indemnity industry.
Adverse events data have been collated based on notifications by doctors to their indemnity insurers in the past 12 months. While much of the information from insurers has been available in the past, creating an Australia-wide picture of risk areas has not previously been possible because the events have been coded differently by each insurer.
The report will be published by the Medical Insurers Industry Association of Australia.
The association’s chairman, Dr Jonathan Burdon, said: “We are going to be able to compare apples with apples. Traditionally an insurer in Victoria can say that they have no problems in a specific area of obstetrics and that may be true, but you could find that when looked at nationally there were issues that needed addressing.”
The new level of co-operation among indemnity insurers is the product of work by the Risk Management Working Party.
Chairman Dr Chris Cain said the new database could mean problem areas would be identified sooner — especially before they reached the court system.
“It will allow us to pick up problem areas — like, say, issues around [a failure to correctly insert] Implanon.”
The database will also feed back information to the medical colleges, which will be able to issue guidelines to the profession on areas of clinical concern.
The latest move in adverse event reporting follows the release of a report into the number of sentinel events in 759 public hospitals.
It found that in 2004-05 there were 130 reports. The most common error, with 53 occurences, was a procedure performed on the wrong body part. The second most common error — 23 in total — was material left inside patients after operations.
However, the report also found that 25 patients had committed suicide as inpatients and 16 women had died in childbirth or soon after.
Reproduced with permission from Australian Doctor, 26th July 2007.