Happy New Year

Good morning and Happy New Year everyone.

Here is my first 1-minute blog of the year.

So last week was a milestone in my research. After 9 months of going through various ethics committees and chasing of legal agreements, I had the Data Sharing Agreement signed off by all parties.

So why the big deal? Well, in the next week or so I will be collecting over 9 million national patient safety incident reports to begin the first stage of my study…where to begin??

Based on the publicly available data, infrastructure is one of only two primary reporting categories to be diminishing in the number of reports over the last 5 years (the other being ‘other’ category). Why is this? Is it because the buildings are now safer, or is it because we have become blind to the state and impact of the infrastructure around us?

(Summary of all NRLS incident reports since 2005/6 by category)

The records will help me ascertain whether the effects of infrastructure are no longer being seen as a primary cause of incidents, but are taken as latent contributing factors, or whether the infrastructure is not considered by those reporting patient incidents to play any part.

I would be keen to understand why you believe infrastructure reporting category is diminishing over time.