Thematic analysis in patient safety: Turning intelligence into insight

Overview

Use thematic analysis to identify cross-cutting safety themes and support PSIRF learning and improvement.

Thematic analysis for patient safety learning

Organisations increasingly need to learn not only from individual incidents, but from the wider patterns that emerge across complaints, claims, risks, audits, and other sources of safety intelligence. This specialist course provides a practical introduction to thematic analysis for patient safety learning, helping teams identify recurring themes, common contributory factors, and system-level risks across multiple data sources.

The course from Promethean Human Designs is designed for organisations that want to strengthen how they use safety information to support learning, improvement, and decision-making. Rather than treating incidents in isolation, participants will explore how to bring together dispersed intelligence and turn it into useful insight that can inform PSIRF planning, governance discussions, service redesign, and proactive improvement priorities.

This is a practical and applied course. Participants will be introduced to structured approaches for reviewing data, identifying themes and subthemes, coding information, distinguishing meaningful signals from noise, and presenting thematic findings in a way that supports action.

Whether your team is carrying out cross-cutting reviews, preparing material for governance meetings, or looking to strengthen organisational learning from safety data, this course will provide useful methods and frameworks to support more strategic patient safety work.

Why this course matters

Healthcare organisations are under increasing pressure to make better use of the safety information they already hold. Incidents, complaints, claims, risks, audits, and other data sources often contain important patterns — but these can be missed if information is reviewed in isolation.

This course helps teams:

• improve the quality of thematic reviews
• identify recurring risks and contributory factors
• generate stronger cross-cutting learning
• support more strategic patient safety discussions
• strengthen how safety intelligence informs improvement priorities
• By developing a more structured approach to thematic analysis, organisations can move towards more proactive, system-focused patient safety learning.

Intended audience

This course is suitable for:

• patient safety specialists
• governance and risk teams
• quality improvement leads
• divisional governance staff
• service managers
• clinical leaders involved in learning from safety information
• staff responsible for reviewing or synthesising incidents, complaints, claims, risks, or related intelligence across departments or services

You do not need to be a qualitative research specialist to attend. The course is designed to be practical, accessible, and directly relevant to organisational safety work.

What the course covers

Participants will explore:

• what thematic analysis is and when to use it
• moving from single-event learning to cross-cutting insight
• working with incidents, complaints, risks, audits, claims, and other data sources
• identifying themes, subthemes, and recurring contributory factors
• using structured approaches to coding and synthesis
• distinguishing signal from noise
• presenting thematic findings in ways that support decision-making
• linking thematic learning to PSIRF, governance, and improvement priorities

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• describe the purpose and value of thematic analysis in patient safety work
• use a structured approach to identify patterns across multiple sources of information
• develop clearer thematic findings that support organisational learning
• translate themes into improvement priorities, action planning, and governance discussion
• contribute to more strategic and proactive approaches to patient safety learning

Tailoring and follow-up

The course can be tailored to local governance structures, incident themes, or improvement priorities. Optional follow-up support can also be provided, including:

• support with live thematic reviews
• development or refinement of coding frameworks
• facilitated interpretation sessions for safety teams
• help translating findings into governance and improvement actions

Register