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. The clinical incident rate is calculated by dividing the total number of clinical incidents (or type) 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.

Sometimes the clinical incidents reported occurred outside the reporting hospital. Even when this occurs, our hospitals investigate and review these cases. This is our commitment to your care.

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.