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Prevention prevails over cure |
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The abbreviation CIRS stands for Critical Incident Reporting System, and means systematic collection of critical mistakes. Therefore, CIRS not only grasps real errors but it detects also those events that can lead to real mistakes, commonly referred to as “near miss”. In fact, CIRS is part of quality assurance programs of the Swiss Union for Laboratory Medicine, SULM.
SULM-CIRS thus works for preventing errors. Outlined as a prospective error-detection system, CIRS allows one to learn from mistakes even before they will occur. It is generally acknowledged that near misses do occur about x200 more frequently than real mistakes making CIRS a teaching tool for continuous education at the laboratory bench. In addition, a forum for anonymous and voluntary reports is thus possible on a national level, similarly to what is practiced with adverse event reporting of drugs (pharmacovigilance).The namelessness of the participants in CIRS is fully respected.
In summary the benefits of SULM-CIRS are the following:
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• Open and fault-tolerant management of errors
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• Mistakes are not kept secret
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• Development of tolerance towards errors of colleagues
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• Attention towards possible errors as the work is in progress
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