YQSR Seminar. Patient safety challenges in community-based mental health services: an overlooked and underexplored setting for safety improvement

Patient safety incidents are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Mental health services have, however, been largely absent from the evolving patient safety evidence base, in which over 20 years of publications have concentrated primarily on physical healthcare. Patient safety in community-based mental health services, where most mental healthcare is delivered, resembles a particularly poorly understood and insufficiently explored landscape.

In this presentation, Dr Phoebe Averill, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Imperial College London, reflects on her THIS Institute funded PhD research, through which she sought to begin to address the knowledge gap for patient safety challenges in mental healthcare delivered beyond the hospital setting. The main aims of this research were to study the nature of patient safety problems in community-based mental healthcare and to identify priorities for future interventional research. This talk will reflect on some of the overlaps in patient safety challenges observed in many healthcare contexts, alongside specialty- and setting-specific concerns of relevance to long-term, community mental healthcare journeys.

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