9. Have the incident-based inspections had an effect?

The purpose of the reporting scheme as regards the most serious incidents is to identify unsafe circumstances more rapidly, so that they can be rectified and patient safety brought up to standard. This begs the question of whether reports submitted from the municipal health and care services have actually served to improve patient safety. Based on the statistics so far it is not possible to quantify the effect of improvement measures locally or nationally. This is due in part to the relatively limited number of incidents reported and the wide-ranging of those incidents. For the same reason, it is also not possible to quantify the trends in terms of numbers.

Nonetheless, in our experience, the organisations find that incident-based inspections help them to identify risk areas and quality improvement measures, and also support them in carrying out those measures.

In our regulatory inspections and reports, we aim to evaluate incidents and recommend measures for improvement from a systemic perspective. Our aim is for risk areas and improvement measures to be described so generally that they can be applicable to organisations beyond those actually involved. The majority of incident-based inspection reports are published in a redacted version on the Norwegian Board of Health Supervision website. We believe that our inspection reports can serve as important sources for guiding the active commitment to patient safety and efforts to realise lessons learned and improvements.

In addition, we have found that information sharing is achieved by municipalities that have undergone an inspection being contacted to share their experience of improvement projects after the inspection. We are also increasingly being contacted to give talks and communicate our regulatory findings in various forums within the municipal health and care services.