The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners
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Multicenter Study
Central or local incident reporting? A comparative study in Dutch GP out-of-hours services.
Centralised incident reporting in a Dutch collaboration of nine out-of-hours services yielded very few incident reports. To improve incident reporting and the awareness of primary caregivers about patient safety issues, a local incident-reporting procedure was implemented. ⋯ It is likely that a local incident-reporting procedure increases the willingness to report and facilitates faster implementation of improvements. In contrast, the central procedure, by collating reports from many settings, seems better at addressing generic and recurring safety issues. The advantages of both approaches should be combined.