The Policy was revised in January 2010 to mandate the reporting of two more categories of serious untoward events, namely medication error and misidentification that could have led to death or permanent harm to patients.
In this year’s report, there were a total of 44 sentinel events reported during the period, compared to 33 in 2011 and 40 events in 2010.
It was noted that the increase is mainly attributed to more cases of “patient suicide” and “retained instruments or other material after surgery/interventional procedure”, an increase of nine and six cases respectively compared to 2011.