Medical indemnity claim—primary incident or allegation type, health-care code NN[N]

Guide for use:

Only one code may be selected for this data element.

The code recorded as the primary incident or allegation type should be that which best reflects the main, dominant or primary cause giving rise to a medical indemnity claim.

Where a series of events contributed to the incident that gave rise to a medical indemnity claim, and it is difficult to identify the primary incident or allegation type the first event in the series should be coded.

Comments:

The coding categories for this data element have been developed with reference to a range of classifications currently in use, among which there is a high degree of commonality in terms of the categories identified. At the time of developing this data element a list of 46 categories of ‘clinical incident category alleged in claim’ was used in New South Wales to record this information. This list was also adopted for use in Tasmania. In Western Australia eight broad ‘incident type’ categories were used to collect this information on clinical incident notification forms. Two studies of the epidemiology of adverse events (one Australian and one from the United States of America) used similar, broad categories of the nature of adverse events to analyse data (Thomas et al. 2000; Wilson et al. 1995).

There is concordance between the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (2006) National Claims and Policies Database claims data item 15 'Cause of loss' and the Medical Indemnity National Collection data item (AIHW 2011).