Safety in Radiation Oncology (SAFRON)
What is SAFRON
SAFRON, Safety in Radiation Oncology is an integrated voluntary reporting and learning system in radiotherapy and radionuclide therapy incidents and near misses.
The main goal of SAFRON is to improve the safe planning and delivery of radiotherapy and radionuclide therapy by sharing safety-related events and safety analysis around the world. Information submitted is dependent on facilities registering and sharing incidents that occur in their institutions.
Having started in December 2012, SAFRON has over 50 registered medical facilities and hospitals all over the world. The system has over 1300 incident reports covering various types of incidents including errors and near misses.
To access SAFRON, users need to be registered with NUCLEUS.
To contribute to SAFRON reporting, users need to register with both NUCLEUS and SAFRON. A self-study instructional video is available in the section entitled “User Instructions” below.
What are the goals of SAFRON?
- To promote patients safety in medical facilities by learning about reported events in an effort to reduce the likelihood of the events being repeated;
- To assist medical facilities in promoting safety culture and improving patient safety through analysis of near misses and incidents;
- To establish a database of safety related resources;
- To provide users with the ability to analyze and benchmark safety improvement efforts.
What are the SAFRON features?
- A simple way to submit information on near misses and errors that occur in a medical facility;
- Open source capabilities for reviewing incident reports;
- Learning about near misses and events in an effort to educate and improve safety;
- Central location of related documents and links of safety related peer reviewed articles and reports;
- Ability to perform statistical analysis on reported events for both the contributors and the viewers. For the contributors the ability to perform extensive analysis of their facilities reports, benchmarking capabilities to compare own incident reports against all submitted incident reports.
How to use SAFRON
Self-Study Training
This instructional video explains how to use SAFRON as a viewer/contributor and guides you through specific parts of the reporting system.
Registration Instructions
This instructional video explains the registrations steps necessary for accessing SAFRON radiotherapy. To register for SAFRON radionuclide therapy, please see the registrations instructions here.
FAQs
This is a list of frequently asked questions, which are not covered in Self-Study Training or Registration Instructions.
SAFRON updates
SAFRON publishes periodic updates covering various topics related to safety in radiotherapy:
2021 March: Effective use of timeout
2020 May: Launch of SAFRON for Radionuclide Therapy
2019 May: Using Checklists Effectively
2018 December: The Bad Apple Theory
2017 December: SEVRRA-SAFRON
2017 August: Brachytherapy
2017 February: E-learning on Safety and Quality in Radiotherapy
2016 August: Check, review and report
2016 March: Learning from new misses
2015 October: Safety Culture
2015 June: Distractions and interruptions
2015 January: Treatment planning errors
Related articles and links
- Radiotherapy Risk Profile, World Health Organization (WHO)
- Towards Safer Radiotherapy, UK
- Safer radiotherapy: error data analysis, Public Health England (PHE)
- Newsletter for radiotherapy professionals, The French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN)
- Quarterly reports from RO-ILS(Radiation Oncology Incident Learning System), The American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO)
- Information Model for Patient Safety, World Health Organization (WHO)
- From Information to Action, World Health Organization (WHO)
Other incident reporting systems