Health-care incident—date health-care incident occurred, DDMMYYYY

Guide for use:

The date should reflect when the primary incident or allegation type occurred. Where the 'Primary incident or allegation type' reflects a series of events that occurred over a period of months (for example, repeated failure to diagnose a condition), the date when the first event occurred should be recorded. For example, where a missed diagnosis was the main, dominant or primary cause giving rise to a medical indemnity claim, the date recorded should reflect when the diagnosis should first have been made, but was not.

This data element should be used in conjunction with the data element: Date—accuracy indicator, code AAA to flag whether each component of the date reported is accurate, estimated or unknown.

Comments:

This data element is equivalent to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (2006) National Claims and Policies Database data item 9 'Date of loss' which collects information on the date on which the incident giving rise to the claim is believed to have occurred.

It is recognised that 'date of discoverability' is recorded in some jurisdictions, and may also be used in the specification of the statutes of limitations in some jurisdictions. The date of discoverability may be some time after the health-care incident occurred; for example, where a doctor fails to diagnose a problem, this may not be discovered for some months. After discussion the Medical Indemnity Data Working Group agreed that the date 'when something went wrong' is likely to be more relevant in the context of the Medical Indemnity National Collection (Public Sector) than 'when it was discovered that something had gone wrong'.