Adverse events (including critical incidents)
Under Australian Medical Council requirements, the RACGP is responsible for ensuring the safety of registrars and patients. An adverse event or critical incident must be reported to us if it involves a registrar or impacts their training.
It’s important that adverse events (including critical incidents) are reported to the RACGP so we can provide prompt assistance and minimise the impact on your training. It also helps us to identify any issues that are impacting registrars, supervisors and training sites nationally, so we can reduce risks and continuously improve and promote safe learning environments.
Your training site must have processes in place to manage adverse events, critical incidents and near misses whether they involve registrars, supervisors and/or the training site itself. It's important you understand your training site’s processes.
Please refer to the RACGP Adverse event and critical incident management and reporting guidance for training programs.
An adverse event is any disruptive event that causes, or risks causing, significant harm to patients, registrars, GP supervisors, training site staff, training program staff or the associated organisations involved in program delivery.
A critical incident is any adverse event that results in a serious negative outcome for patients, registrars, GP supervisors, training site staff, training program staff, the RACGP and/or its staff, the reputation of the AGPT program or any combination of these.
Reporting an incident or event
It's your responsibility to report incidents and events as soon as possible. The privacy of your report will be protected and will only be accessible to RACGP staff who require access. As a registrar, if you're involved in any type of adverse event, you must follow the reporting requirements, and report the event.
For further information about reporting an adverse event, speak to your TC and/or ME, or contact the RACGP at
adverseevents@racgp.org.au