366 Covid-19-related hospital incidents reported on NIMS

The health service has reported 366 incidents on the national incident management system (NIMS) related to Covid-19 in the acute hospital sector, as of 12 April.

“Covid-19 incidents are actively being reviewed by the SCA [State Claims Agency] and reports forwarded to the HSE, where they are reviewed nationally,” according to an SCA spokesperson.

They said personal protective equipment (PPE)-related incidents have been identified in relation to healthcare workers and service users.  

“However, the dataset is still small and trends will change as the health service Covid-19 response develops. For instance, access to/lack of PPE was identified in early March incidents but in recent weeks, reports of these type of incidents have reduced.”

NIMS is the healthcare sector’s (HSE and voluntary agencies) end-to-end incident and risk management system supporting the national incident management framework and learning from incident reporting and review. NIMS is hosted and supported by the SCA.

The system captures all incident types, particularly patient and service user incidents, healthcare worker incidents and dangerous occurrences.  

“Incident types collected have always included healthcare infection control incidents as a result of exposure to biological hazards, including coronavirus infections,” according to the SCA spokesperson.

“At the commencement of the pandemic, NIMS was updated to include Covid-19 as a specific pick-list option to the hazard classification and type of injury on NIMS.”

NIMS has also been configured to allow for access to homeworkers. Additional reporting processes are being developed to facilitate reporting from testing centres, surveillance centres and other temporary sites.  

“There has been no discernible drop in reporting for service user and staff incidents in the first three months of this year,” added the SCA’s spokesperson.