Incident reporting: rare incidents may benefit from national problem solving

We would like to congratulate the authors on the pragmatic nationwide approach that they have adopted in Denmark to address the key issues around incident reporting. Rabol and colleagues1 highlight again the challenges of collecting and meaningfully using such data.

Though experts in Denmark have drawn many of the same conclusions reached in our Delphi exercise,2 it is interesting that our findings differed on the usefulness of incident reports to detect rare events. The Danish Society concluded that rare events are difficult to detect due to deficiencies in data mining and that efforts are better spent solving known safety problems at a local level. Undoubtedly, the management of 'big data' is challenging, and one must consider carefully resource allocation at national and local levels. One of the initial 'burning platforms' driving the creation of the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) in England, however,...

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