Significant event reporting in veterinary practice

[...]the medical profession has been working hard to move away from a ‘blame and shame’ culture towards a ‘just and learning’ culture.9 The concept of a just culture is one that balances an environment of honest and transparent reporting while facilitating and promoting learning from mistakes.9 In a just culture, the focus is on the system rather than being on individual errors and outcomes. [...]over the past 10 years, there has been growing interest in veterinary patient safety.10-15 Papers have investigated the use of checklists, incident reporting, clinical audit, morbidity and mortality rounds and the types of error in veterinary practice.16-28 These studies have established a baseline from which to develop the concept of patient safety in the veterinary profession, but we still have a great deal of work to do. In the medical profession, the barriers to reporting are well recognised, including fear, negative attitudes, lack of time, complicated reporting mechanisms and uncertainty around the usefulness of the process.2-5 Barriers can be reduced by providing confidentiality, independent data collection and review, timely and meaningful feedback, ease of reporting and leadership support.2-5 Reporting systems should, therefore, be designed with these facilitators in mind. In their paper, Oxtoby and colleagues concluded that a national veterinary significant event reporting system should be a simple online tool, accessible to all, with readily available feedback and support and hosted by an organisation independent from the regulator (ie, not the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons).29 The results of this study have been used to inform the development of the Veterinary Defence Society’s VetSafe tool,31 which is designed to fulfil the requirements outlined above.