The National System for Incident Reporting

What Is NSIR?
CIHI’s National System for Incident Reporting (NSIR) is a web-based application used by Canadian health care facilities to securely and anonymously share, analyze and discuss medication/IV fluid incidents. Its data and analyses inform quality improvement activities at local, regional, provincial, territorial and national levels to foster improvements in health care delivery.

NSIR Overview (PDF)
Intro to NSIR video

How Does NSIR Work?

• A medication incident is discovered and reported internally.
• Details are reviewed internally for data quality.
• The incident report is finalized and submitted anonymously to NSIR.
• Data becomes available for analysis.
• Users may communicate anonymously with each other to obtain additional information and facilitate learning and sharing.

NSIR Data Collection
NSIR collects data on all types of medication incidents, including rare events and near misses. There are currently 10 mandatory and 24 optional data elements for simple and easy data submission.

• Incident Impact: degree of harm to the patient
• Incident Discovery: who, when and where
• Patient Characteristics: age and sex
• Medication Incident Details: medication/IV fluid problem and process, contributing factors
• Drug Product Information: drug name, strength, dosage, form
• Investigation and Findings: results of the investigation, lessons learned

Read our Privacy and Information Protection Policy

Benefits of NSIR

• NSIR allows you to share your experiences and exemplary practices and to learn from others. You can gain insight into similarities in the sources of risks and underlying system failures.
• NSIR can help in the creation of prevention strategies that can reduce or eliminate future incidents and improve patient safety.
• Implementation can be phased in, beginning with a single ward/unit and expanding over time to include other wards/units.

Learning From Incident Data (PDF)
CIHI Data in Action video

NSIR Partners in Patient Safety
NSIR is CIHI’s contribution to the Canadian Medication Incident Reporting and Prevention System (CMIRPS) program. The goal of CMIRPS is to reduce and prevent harmful medication incidents in Canada.

For more information, visit the CMIRPS website.

Data Requests
NSIR data is currently not available for public use.

Contact Us
For more information or to join NSIR, please send an email to nsir@cihi.ca.