NHS England: Progress against digital clinical safety strategic commitments (October 2023)

Summary

NHS England provides regular updates on progress with the implementation of the Digital Clinical Safety Strategy to show how they've captures insights about digital clinical safety, how they are training their workforce to support safety in this area and how they use technology to drive safer care.

Content

October 2023 update:

Since the publication of the Digital Clinical Safety Strategy in September 2021, NHS England have been working towards two aims:

1. To improve the safety of digital technologies in health and care, now and in the future.
2. To identify, and promote the use of, digital technologies as solutions to patient safety challenges.

The health service continues to see the steady increase of digital health technologies, and with it a heightened interest in digital clinical safety. This has driven progress towards these aims as well as the strategy’s five strategic commitments. Ensuring patient safety is reflected in the digitisation agenda remains a key component of the National Patient Safety Strategy.

Commitment 1: Collect information about digital clinical safety, including as part of the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service and use it to improve system-wide learning.

• Worked with the LFPSE team to ensure the system accurately and thoroughly captures digital clinical safety information. This includes adding three new digital clinical safety specific fields for certain types of incidents.
• There is now a national process in place to ensure routinely collected patient safety data is reviewed by digital clinical safety experts in the same way that all other safety incidents are reviewed, including a formal review of all incidents indicating severe harm or death.
• The digital safety teams within NHS England became accredited to issue National Patient Safety Alerts.

Commitment 2: Develop new digital clinical safety training materials and expand access to training across the health and care workforce.

• Developed and launched a new training package called the Essentials of Digital Clinical Safety, with over 1,100 members of NHS staff trained so far.
• Developed an intermediate training package specifically for senior leaders and patient safety specialists.
• An innovative ‘train the trainer’ pilot has been commissioned to train 24 digital clinical safety professionals as trainers, enabling regions to rapidly increase the number of CSOs and create an environment of peer-to-peer support and local mentorship for digital clinical safety.

Commitment 3: Create a centralised source of digital clinical safety information, including optimised standards, guidelines and best practice blueprints.

• Created a dedicated FutureNHS workspace to showcase blueprints that share best practice. The workspace also supports the NHS to build communities around digital clinical safety.
• To date, in partnership with individual NHS organisations, we have published six blueprints to help organisations ensure clinical leadership and involvement at the earliest opportunity when a new digital system is implemented, so that risks are mitigated and plans are clinically focussed with a user centred design approach.

Commitment 4: Accelerate the adoption of digital technologies to record and track implanted medical devices.

• Launched a Scan4Safety website including a suite of Scan4Safety guidance material that enables organisations to understand the key benefits and cost savings associated with a Scan4Safety Programme. It includes key messages from MHRA, NHS England and trusts already using Scan4Safety. It offers trusts a practical guide for how to get started.
• Continued to provide advice, guidance and support to organisations that were prioritising local implementation of Scan4Safety. In addition, NHS England have also engaged with board members across acute providers to better understand their awareness of and plans to introduce Scan4Safety.
• The Outcomes and Registries programme will be used to improve patient safety and outcomes in procedures that use high-risk medical devices.

Commitment 5: Generate evidence for how digital technologies can be best applied to patient safety challenges.

• Worked with existing patient safety data to explore patient safety risks associated with certain digital technologies.
• Built analytic partnerships with organisations like NHS Resolution to explore the potential for patient safety claims data to reveal new insights about digital clinical safety.
• Leveraged integrated working across patient safety teams to ensure that digital clinical safety features on upcoming national frameworks for patient safety research priorities.
• Developed a benefits case for major digital transformation programmes in frontline services to evaluate their impact on safety.
• NHS Resolution worked with a large acute provider to analyse claims data and other patient safety data to consider how digital technologies contributed to or helped mitigate the risk of harm. A machine learning methodology was developed that could be replicated across other organisations.