Patient safety is at the heart of everything we do and we are committed to delivering the highest standards of care as set out in NHS England’s Patient Safety Strategy. This includes raising awareness of patient safety issues, improving understanding around processes which might have a negative impact on patient safety and engaging in an open and transparent way with staff and patients to help with the early identification of problems or risks. We also carry out regular visits to acute and community sites where patients receive treatments or care and the monitoring of patient safety issues, to identify opportunities to share learning from events.
What we want to achieve
We want to deliver NHS England’s Patient Safety Strategy, by:
- Ensuring all staff within the organisation have undertaken basic patient safety awareness training and are promoting a safety culture across the organisation.
- Improving the quality of incident reporting so that it is meaningful and offers opportunities to learn where problems have occurred.
- Ensuring there are robust mechanisms in place to measure and report safety incidents, whether they result in harm or not, providing vital insight into what can go wrong in healthcare and the reasons why.
- Involving patients, their families and carers and other members of the public in improving the safety of NHS care and promoting greater safety awareness throughout the organisation.
- Establishing learning relationships with health and care partner organisations by working collaboratively to undertake site visits where patients receive treatment or care, to ensure mechanisms and processes are as safe as they can be.
- Being responsive to system failures to reduce incidents being repeated.
- Working to ensure that quality improvement and patient safety is a consideration when commissioning services.
Where we are now
- Patient safety training is now part of our staff training programme across the Integrated Care System.
- We have a full-time patient safety specialist (PSS) to support the delivery of the NHS England’s Patient Safety Strategy and associated work.
- We are part of a collaborative PSS group meeting which aims to ensure an equitable approach to patient safety practices across the health and care system.
- We host a weekly panel which looks at patient safety incidents and investigations across the health system, to ensure the events are captured appropriately and explores opportunity for shared learning.