NHS England: Improving patient safety culture – a practical guide (updated 11 July 2023)

Summary

Improving patient safety culture – a practical guide, developed in association with the AHSN Network, brings together existing approaches to shifting safety culture as a resource to support teams to understand their safety culture and how to approach improving it.

It is intended to be used across health and social care to support everyone to improve the safety culture in their organisation or area. The guide specifically focuses on:

• teamwork
• communication
• just culture
• psychological safety
• promoting diversity and inclusive behaviours
• civility.

Teams should use the guide to find a way to start to improve their culture that is most relevant to their local context. It will support teams to explore different approaches to help them to create windows into their daily work to help them to understand their local safety culture.