Suzette Woodward: An organisation with a memory (4 April 2025)

Summary

In many ways the year 2000 was the start of the safety movement as we know it today.  There are many safety scholars out there who will cite the work as far back as the late 1800s that helped our thinking in patient safety and the brilliance of our anaesthetic colleagues who were in fact the first people to coin the term ‘patient safety’ in the 1970s. However…the year 2000 heralded the seminal document published in the UK by the then Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, ‘an organisation with a memory’ after convening a group of safety experts, including James Reason, to understand what we needed to do to improve patient safety in the NHS. 

Because things are changing again … those words ‘an organisation with a memory’ are hugely important. It is vital to remember the past and think about what we can learn from it . Hindsight is a wonderful way of looking back at the valuable lessons for the future, writes Suzette Woodward.