Patient Safety Officers are always looking for new ways to encourage reporting within their facilities, and we wanted to share our hospital’s experience implementing a patient safety hotline.

We implemented a patient safety hotline in September 2002 as part of the requirement under Act 13 of 2002 to “establish a system for health care workers to report serious events and incidents which shall be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week” (Section 307, (b)(3)). This dedicated phone line for our staff to report patient safety events they believed to be serious was in addition to reporting to our Risk Managers, who were already on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Staff can report events through the hotline anonymously, if they choose. We educate our staff to use the hotline through information in our Patient Safety Plan, via advertisement on our Hospital Intranet page and quarterly Patient Safety newsletter, as part of our new hire education sessions, and as a reminder message in our web-based on-line patient safety reporting system.

We have also recently implemented web-based on-line event reporting within our facility (rL Solutions, Risk MonitorPro), which gives our staff another mechanism for reporting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On-line event reporting has afforded us the opportunity to receive reports in real-time. After receiving a hotline call, we can immediately pull up the report if it has already been submitted.

The hotline has been very successful and averages approximately 60 calls per quarter. It allows for timely notification of events/incidents, allowing us to meet the timeliness requirements for patient notification and submission to PA-PSRS, should the event be determined to be serious.

These tips may help other facilities considering a hotline or implementation of an electronic patient safety event reporting system.

Kelly Beauchamps
Patient Safety Analyst
Lehigh Valley Hospital, Allentown

Kristie Lowery
Patient Safety Officer
Lehigh Valley Hospital, Allentown