Multiple accountabilities in incident reporting and management

Abstract

In this article, we examine the current and increasing emphasis on accountability and patient safety in health care, focusing on practices of incident reporting and management in New South Wales, Australia. We describe the frames of accountability associated with an incident reporting system, and explore how this system manifests in practice. In contrast to literature that situates incident reporting and local practices as oppositional, we used ethnographic methods to observe the incident management practices of clinical staff in a hospital, and found evidence to characterize this relationship differently. We found that accountability has multiple conceptualizations, and we present three fin..