Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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30. To ask the Minister for Health if he will provide an update on the progress being made on the new protocols for hospital discharges to stepdown facilities; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2017/24]

Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)
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It is of the utmost importance that services are encouraged to report all incidents. This reporting includes minor incidents and near misses. A cornerstone of improving the safety of our health services is continuous improvement based on learning from errors and adverse events. Reporting of all incidents promotes learning within services and informs improvements.

A variety of incident types can occur within health and social care services. The HSE’s Incident Management Framework is applied to the management of individual incidents. It is also the mechanism for incident reviews in the HSE.

The HSE’s Incident Management Framework is designed to provide services with a practical and proportionate approach to the management of incidents. The focus of the Framework is on understanding how and why an incident occurred and using this knowledge to improve safety.

An incident is defined in the HSE’s Incident Management Framework as: “an event or circumstance which could have, or did lead to unintended and/or unnecessary harm.” This includes clinical or non-clinical incidents which occur in health services.

The most serious of these incidents are Category 1 incidents which are clinical or non-clinical incidents rated as major/extreme as per the HSE’s Risk Impact Table. These category 1 incidents consistently remain less than 1% of all incidents nationally which is in line with targets (NSP KPI target <1%).

There has been a continuous rise in incident reporting which is seen as a positive in terms of culture. This reflects the efforts of services to report incidents with a view to promoting learning and improvements.

The reporting of and learning from all incidents remains a focus for the HSE's National Quality and Patient Safety Directorate. A number of ongoing strategies within the HSE to promote incident reporting and learning include:

• improving the incident reporting system,
• emphasis on a just culture
• sharing incident learning through PatientSafetyTogether which is a platform that shares learning with health services and the public.