Incident reporting reduction during the COVID-19 pandemic in a tertiary Italian hospital: A retrospective analysis

Background Incident reporting (IR) is one of the most used systems to gain knowledge of adverse events (AEs) and to identify sources of risk. During COVID-19 pandemic, several organizational changes have been implemented to respond adequately and effectively to the emergency; this required the suspension of most deferrable activities. Objective The aim of this study is to investigate whether IR attitude of health workers has been reduced during the pandemic event. Method A retrospective analysis was conducted at the Azienda Ospedale - Universita di Padova (Italy), considering IR of years 2019 and 2020. To standardize the effects of the decrease in admissions, we considered the number of incidents per 1000 admissions. Results Data shows that during the first (March-May 2020) and second waves (October-December 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a statistically significant reduction in the rate of IR for every 1000 admissions (P = 0.001-Wilcoxon test), especially for AEs and in COVID-19 units. Conclusion This study shows a reduction in IR especially during the first and second pandemic waves of COVID-19 in year 2020. Education and training interventions could be fundamental to raise awareness of the importance of IR in health workers, as this could provide opportunities to understand what is impacting on safety in a particular healthcare context and enable continuous improvement.