ABSTRACT
Incident and error reporting in the radiation oncology setting is becoming a more embraced and necessary practice in
the twenty-rst century. Several incident reporting databases are available worldwide for the capturing of events, such as the ROSIS network from the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology (ESTRO 2008), Patient Safety Net from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ 2010), or in-house developed systems (Mutic et al. 2008). e reporting of medical events or near misses allows the department or hospital to perform a root cause analysis (RCA) to determine what, if any, steps should be added to the QM program to reduce the likelihood of the incident from occurring again. e problem with RCA alone is that it is a reactionary process subsequent to an actual event. An FMEA approach encourages evaluation of a process from start to nish and investigates a priori where there is need for improvement in either quality control practices or procedures. is is particularly important to the practice of brachytherapy, although FMEA is challenging for any procedure.
