ASA Delivers Detailed Recommendations on Proposed Updates to the Serious Reportable Events

This week, ASA submitted formal comments to the National Quality Forum (NQF) and The Joint Commission (TJC) in response to proposed updates to the Serious Reportable Events (SRE) List, the first major revisions since 2011. ASA commended NQF and TJC for reinforcing safety and accountability with their updates while urging greater transparency in the development of the SRE list and recommending that the list be supplemented with rationales and implementation strategies for SRE prevention. ASA’s comments stressed anesthesiologists’ leadership in patient safety and perioperative care.

Among its more targeted recommendations, ASA requested a clarified definition of “unavoidable events” in the context of anesthesia or sedation harm for ASA Class I or II patients. ASA asked that the event concerning medication errors more clearly address complexity in perioperative settings and refocus on systems improvement rather than individual culpability. ASA recommended reframing the SRE on MRI harm to include safety breaches and near-misses, rather than solely focusing on patient outcomes.

ASA pushed back on a new event focused on harm for neonatal patients, citing that the event criteria are applicable to all patients. ASA recommended that any neonatal-specific event target clinical scenarios that are distinctly associated with neonatal cases. ASA also opposed a new SRE on unrecognized clinical deterioration, as the proposed criteria are broad and could lead to inconsistent application.

Click here to read ASA’s comment letter.

For more information on the proposed revisions, please see NQF’s Request for Public Comment document.

Please contact the ASA Department of Quality and Regulatory Affairs at [email protected] with any questions.