British journal of anaesthesia
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Incident reporting is a widely recommended method to measure undesirable events in anaesthesia. Under-utilization is a major weakness of voluntary incident reporting systems. Little is known about factors influencing reporting practices, particularly the clinical environment, anaesthesia team composition, severity of the incident, and perceived risk of litigation. The purpose of this study was to assess each of these, using an existing anaesthesia database. ⋯ Clinical factors play a significant role in the utilization of an anaesthesia incident reporting system and more particularly, severity of complications and higher liability risks which appear more as incentives than barriers to incident reporting.