Event details
This seminar is hosted by the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group and hosted by Professor Jane O'Hara from the University of Leeds.
Understanding what happens when things go wrong in healthcare remains the cornerstone of patient safety policy globally. Organisations want, and need, to learn about safety failures in order to try and reduce the likelihood of similar events happening in the future. Patients and families also want to prevent future recurrence of safety failures. On the face of it, engaging with patients and families in serious incident investigations seems like an obviously important aim, and perhaps one that should be relatively straightforward to achieve. However, despite a range of policy directives for involving patients and families in the process of investigating serious safety failures, the practice of involvement remains variable. This webinar will present findings from a programme of work funded by the National Institute for Health Research, which has developed, and is now testing, new guidance for engaging patients and families in serious incident investigations. I will discuss what patients and families want from incident investigations, and how this has shaped our co-design of the new guidance. I will also consider how sometimes, different understandings of what justice might mean for responses to safety failures, can lead to problems for organisations, staff and patients and families. I will propose that involvement of patients and families is a deceptively simple endeavour, and that without careful articulation of what different stakeholders want and need following safety failures, we can compromise organisational learning, and most importantly, risk compounding the harm for those affected.
Biography
Jane O’Hara is Professor of Healthcare Quality and Safety, based within the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, UK. She is Deputy Director of the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group, and theme lead for the Patient Involvement in Patient Safety theme within the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. Jane also holds a Visiting Professor position at the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
Register for this event. If you have questions about this event, please contact the seminar organisers Siobhan McHugh or Helen Smith.