The Joint Commission has released its Sentinel Event Data Annual Report for 2023, reviewing 1,411 sentinel events from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2023.
The most prevalent event types in 2023 include falls (48%), wrong surgery (8%), unintended retention of foreign object (8%), assault/rape/sexual assault/homicide (8%), delay in treatment (6%), and suicide (5%). These event types “comprised 83% of all reported sentinel events in 2023,” and 96% of those events were “voluntarily self-reported to The Joint Commission by an accredited or certified entity. The remaining 53 sentinel events were reported either by anonymous sources, patients (or their families), or employees (current or former) of the organization.”
The Joint Commission stresses that reporting sentinel events is a “voluntary process and, as such, epidemiological inferences are not reliable. No conclusions should be drawn about the actual relative frequency of events or trends in events over time.”
