Improving patient safety: a financial imperative (Helen Hughes, 17 March 2023)

Summary

In a blog for the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), Patient Safety Learning’s Chief Executive Helen Hughes highlights both the human and financial costs associated with the persistence of avoidable harm in healthcare. She outlines how Finance directors should play a key role in improving patient safety and argues that they have an essential corporate leadership role to ensure healthcare is both effective and safe.

Content

Highlighting the scale of avoidable harm in healthcare, this HFMA article notes that:

• In high-income countries, the World Health Organization estimates that 1 in every 10 patients is harmed while receiving hospital care. This harm can be caused by a range of adverse events, with more than 40% of them being preventable.
• NHS England estimates, pre-Covid, that there are around 11,000 avoidable deaths annually due to safety concerns.

Turning to the financial impact of this, it highlights that:

• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the direct cost of treating patients who have been harmed during their care in high-income countries approaches 13% of health spending. Excluding safety lapses that may not be preventable, this figure is considered to be 8.7% of health expenditure.
• The cost of settling litigation claims in the NHS in 2021/22 came to £2.5bn, with a further £13.3bn spent on compensation claims settled in previous years.

Discussing key role that Finance directors can play in improving patient safety, it identifies four key priorities they should consider:

1. Financial incentives: ensuring that existing measures don’t have unintended negative impacts on safety and the development of mechanisms to incentivise safer care.
2. Board oversight: highlighting the financial implications of avoidable harm in board reports and risk registers; the true costs of unsafe care.
3. Developing and supporting a business case for safety: investing in re-designing systems, processes and ways of working to deliver safer care and reduce the costs of avoidable harm.
4. Championing patient safety: safer organisations are more cost-effective ones.