5. Who submitted the reports?

According to Section 12-3 a of the Health and Care Services Act, “an organisation that provides health and care services shall immediately report to the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision any death or severe harm to a patient or user as a result of the service provided or by a patient or user harming another patient or user. The reporting duty applies if the outcome is unexpected based on foreseeable risk.”

In the digital registration form for organisations at melde.no, we ask the informant to state their “role” in the incident as a manager, healthcare provider or other employee. On the form for individuals at helsenorge.no, informants record their relationship with the patient/user if their report concerns someone other than themselves.

Of the 854 reports submitted from municipal health and care services, 823 reports concerned those services. As shown in Table 1, these reports were mainly made by managers. In addition, we received 52 reports from the specialist health service and one report from private-sector municipal health services that also concerned municipal health and care services; i.e. a total of 876 reports from organisations concerning municipal health and care services.

In total, we received 73 reports from “other employee”. The majority of these were various types of health and care workers as well as a few quality management employees. For 87 reports, we lack information about the informant’s role because this was not recorded before we implemented digital reporting.

Of the individual reports, the majority were from patients/users (59 per cent) (Table 2). Of the individual reports, 33 per cent were submitted by next of kin. Of all the 1,647 reports concerning municipal health and care services, 47 per cent were from individuals.

The reports came from and concerned many municipalities. We have not analysed whether any differences exist between districts, counties or county governor offices..

A total of 122 incidents were reported by more than one person/entity, for example, by both an individual and an organisation or by two different organisations. In the following, we present the number of incidents, not the number of reports. The 1,647 reports presented in Table 1 thus concerned 873 individual incidents that met the reporting scheme criteria and concerned municipal health and care services.