Aims To improve engagement with the incident reporting process and to encourage staff to raise issues and create a proactive culture of quality improvement.

Methods All staff members were invited to take part in the GP Safety Climate Questionnaire pre and post intervention to assess self-reported feelings towards patient safety at the practice. We then developed a novel incident reporting tool which was introduced in collaboration with an adapted ‘Take off, cruising and landing’ daily safety huddle. The incident reporting tool was designed to be as simple as possible, easy to access and quick to complete.

Results Prior to the new tool and adapted safety huddle we had 6 significant event forms completed within the practice in the preceding three months. Following implementation, we had a total of 191 incident forms over a ten-week period (which aimed to capture all issues from low level to significant events). These issues highlighted several process issues within our GP practice namely issues with appointments, inter-practice communication and prescriptions. The safety huddle also allowed issues to handed over from one day to the next formally. GP safety climate questionnaire scores also showed a substantial improvement with below average scores (compared with other practices) pre implementation improving to above average scores post.

Conclusions This project demonstrates that a relatively simple intervention can have effect significant positive cultural change in an organisation over a small period of time. Through this project we were able to generate a wealth of information that we could use to target areas of improvement. By giving frontline staff a mechanism to record issues it is possible to develop a positive culture of grass roots change. Incident reporting can act as a vehicle not only to improve patient safety but more broadly to generate ongoing ideas for quality improvement within an organisation.