The Veterinary Defence Society

The VDS VetSafe system is designed by vets, for vets, to help protect patients, clients and clinicians from professional errors.

The system has three aims:
• Gather data on professional errors that cause patient harm and near misses which could result in a complaint or claim
• Understand why errors occur
• Learn from errors and share that learning amongst our members

VetSafe is the Veterinary Defence Society’s confidential significant event reporting and risk management service. It will capture information about incidents in practice which result in patient harm or other losses. The information in these reports will help us to understand why mistakes happen, and to develop solutions which improve the quality of veterinary care.

The VDS VetSafe App is a quick, convenient and private way to submit a significant event report. The reporting form has been designed to be quick and simple. It should take no more than 3 minutes to complete. Drop down boxes with multiple choices are provided for most of the questions. The form is intelligent, so your choice of answer will then provide you with relevant subsequent options Details of incident is an area for you to input free text and describe what happened. There are some structured questions in this section to help you provide us with as much relevant information as easily as possible.

The form covers the following areas:
• Date and Time of incident.
• Species involved
• Name of the animal
• Name of the owner
• Where the incident occurred
• Level of patient harm
• Your role
• Care delivery point
• Details of incident
• Call back contact details (optional)

The anonymised results will be shared on the VetSafe website, a members-only veterinary patient safety resource. Practices will have access to all their reports, to inform local risk management and enable organisational reflective learning. In order to protect staff member identities, the names of individuals will be removed from these reports.

At the VDS we understand that even highly trained and motivated professionals sometimes make mistakes and that veterinary practice doesn’t always go according to plan. VetSafe helps us learn from our mistakes; it is not a tool for blame, judgement, discipline or performance management.