Reported clinical incidents of children with intellectual disability: A qualitative analysis.
Natalie Ong, Laurel Mimmo, Diana Barnett and 3 others
PMID 35578400WHAT IT FOUND
Parents identified care issues in 13.63% of incident reports for children with intellectual disability, compared to 4.79% for those without.
This was the only category with a significant difference. Staff did not consistently document contributing factors, limiting understanding of why incidents occurred.
Key findings
01Care issues identified by parents were reported significantly more often in children with intellectual disability (13.63%) than in those without (4.79%), while other incident categories showed no significant differences between groups.
02The contributing factors section of incident reports was incomplete in over half of cases for both groups (52.27% for children with intellectual disability and 62.87% for those without), hindering the ability to understand context.
03Multiple clinical incidents occurred in a single report more frequently for children with intellectual disability (31.81%) than for those without (22.7%), often described as co-occurring failures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study relied on incident reports, which are known to under-represent the true number of safety events. The sample of analysed reports was relatively small (44 and 164), limiting the power to detect differences in other categories. The free-text fields were often incomplete or lacked detail on contributing factors, preventing a full understanding of the causes. The analysis could not determine if the intellectual disability diagnosis itself influenced the type of incident, only that the reported themes were similar across groups. The study did not capture parent-reported issues regarding staff attitudes or communication, which are prominent in other literature.
Declared interests
The authors declared no competing interests. The study was approved by the organization's human research ethics committee.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of significant differences in most incident categories as evidence that children with intellectual disability are equally safe. The authors note that incident reporting is often incomplete and that the contributing factors were poorly documented, meaning the true nature and frequency of safety issues may be underestimated.