In some measures of patient safety, near-misses are
incompletely reported and recorded in hospital records
(Potylycki et al. 2006); however, these offer good lessons
for improving patient safety (Berntsen 2004).
Thus, both adverse events and near-misses should be
included when assessing patient safety. Spence Laschinger
and Leiter (2006) have demonstrated the usefulness
of measuring patient safety using self-reported
data. These researchers asked nurses to report the frequency
of patient falls, nosocomial infections, medication
errors and patient complaints in the past year.
When anonymity was ensured, subjective data may reflect
the minimum biased score of patient safety. Such a
subjective measurement approach has been followed in
other recent studies (Teng et al. 2009a).