Incident Reporting and Patient Safety

An incident report starts a safety-improvement process; it does not replace urgent care, clinical charting, or a mandatory report to a regulatory college. When something goes wrong—or almost does—the nurse must keep several tasks distinct: protect and assess the patient, provide care, document clinical facts in the medical record, notify the appropriate people, complete the organization’s occurrence report, and determine whether provincial law requires a separate regulatory report. The event may be a near miss, a no-harm event, or an adverse event. Each reveals something about how safeguards worked or failed. A practical nurse’s report should describe observable facts and contributing conditions, not assign blame or speculate about intent. Reporting a caught error can expose a latent system weakness before the same pathway harms another patient.