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The purpose of national adverse event reporting and alert systems is to contribute to the improvement of health services. Arrangements should promote learning and the prevention of further incidents by investigating the course of events, causal factors and causal relationships and to uncover the need for corrective action. Many countries have such national reporting and alert systems in place, and they are structured in different ways. But what exactly is the best practice?

In this systematic literature search with sorting, we searched bibliographic databases, examined reference lists and citations, and visited the websites of relevant organizations in order to be able to provide a simple overview of what is available in terms of international recommendations on how national notification and alert systems should be set up.

We included 18 publications published between 2000 and 2020. In eleven of the publications, the recommendations were developed according to the conditions of a specific country (Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Great Britain and the United States), but are assumed to have relevance beyond national borders. The other seven are aimed at several countries (EU; OECD) or the whole world.

There are probably recommendations that our literature search did not identify. With publications from organizations such as the WHO, EU, OECD and recommendations based on systems such as the National Reporting and Learning System in Britain after fifteen years of operation, we still believe that this overview international recommendations on national reporting and alert systems is a good starting point for further work.