Safety For All: 2024 conference report

Summary

This report provides an overview of keynote speeches and panel sessions at the third annual Safety For All Conference at the Royal College of Physicians in London on Tuesday 10 December 2024

The Safety For All campaign is focused on driving improvements in and between healthcare worker safety and patient safety. It seeks to highlight how poor staff safety standards and practice impact adversely on patient safety, and vice versa. The campaign champions the need for a systematic and integrated approach to improve safety for staff and patients across health and social care.

Safety For All is jointly coordinated by the Safer Healthcare and Biosafety Network and Patient Safety Learning, supported by Boston Scientific and Stryker.

Content

The event was chaired by Professor Rob Galloway, Accident and Emergency Consultant at the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Trust. It was attended by over 100 members of the healthcare community, including occupational health professionals, patient safety experts, frontline staff, patients and academics.

The report includes summaries of the conference’s speeches by:

• Professor Nicola Ranger, Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing
• Jane Murkin, Deputy Director Safety and Improvement – Nursing Directorate at NHS England.

It also provides an overview of the following panel sessions across the day:

• Protecting lives while protecting the planet.
• Navigating the many faces of violence in healthcare.
• Caring for caregivers and patients – Mental health and safety in healthcare.
• Antimicrobial Resistance – Ensuring patient safety in an era of rising resistance.
• Implementing the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework.

Throughout the speeches and panel discussions that ran across the day, there were several recurring themes:

• The important role of leadership in improving staff safety and patient safety. This being cited as the key to creating safer organisational cultures, modelling safety behaviours and advocating on behalf of patients and staff.
• The need for healthcare workers and patients to speak up in order to create a safer healthcare system, and the challenges of empowering staff to do this and organisations to create safety cultures in a system under significant strain.
• Communication and engagement is key – with staff and patients, and in convening people so they can collaborate for safety. Listening was mentioned throughout as being seen as a luxury, but it is essential to providing person-centred care.
• The challenge of sharing and spreading patient and staff safety initiatives when healthcare workers don't have time/capacity beyond trying to do the day job.