Clinical incidents by SAC rating

This page summarises clinical incidents in each of the financial years shown by their Severity Assessment Code (SAC).

Severity Access Code levels

SAC1

SAC1 incidents are associated with a patient outcome or potential outcome of serious harm or death. These incidents are rare.

SAC2

SAC2 incidents have a patient outcome of moderate harm.

SAC3

SAC3 incidents result in no or minimal harm and are the majority of incidents that occur.

The data includes near misses or good catches where no patient harm occurred.

About the data

In WA, we require public hospitals to report all clinical incidents, including near misses. Sometimes the clinical incidents reported occurred outside hospital. Even when this occurs, our hospitals investigate and review these cases. This is our commitment to your care. On this page, you can find incidents which occurred within inpatient and other settings.

For inpatient data, the clinical incident rate is calculated by dividing the total number of clinical incidents by the total number of patient days and presenting it as a rate per 10,000 patient days in that financial year

Patient days are calculated as the total number of days that a patient was in the hospital until they were discharged. This means that the total number of patient days does not increase until the patient is discharged.

As it is not always clear until the investigation is complete whether systems factors were involved, only data from completed clinical incident investigations is shown.

WA Health has contracts in place with some private providers to deliver care to public patients. These providers must report SAC 1 clinical incidents to the Department of Health but do not report SAC2 and SAC3 incidents to the Department.

The SAC 1 incident data displayed in the dashboard includes incidents associated with public care at these private hospitals.

SAC 2 and SAC 3 clinical incidents associated with private providers contracted to deliver care to public patients are excluded from the dashboard.

For further details about all clinical incidents, please refer to annual reports published by individual Health Service Providers.