Implementing Patient Safety: Addressing Culture, Conditions, and Values to Help People Work Safely by Suzette Woodward

Summary

Over the last two decades across the globe we have seen a multitude of programmes, projects and books to help improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these has not yet been reached.

Most of the current approaches are top down, programmatic and target driven. These look at problems in isolation one harm at a time with simplistic solutions that fail to support a holistic, systematic approach. They are focused on collecting incident data and learning from failure using tools that are not fit for purpose in a complex nonlinear system. Very rarely do the solutions help build the conditions, cultures and behaviours that support a safer system and help the people involved work safely.

This book uniquely combines the latest thinking in safety, including creating a balanced approach to learning from what works as a way to understand why it fails, together with the evidence on building a just culture, positive workplaces and working relationships that we now know are so important for safety.

This book builds on the author’s first book Rethinking Patient Safety which exposed what we need to do differently to truly transform our approach to patient safety. It updates the reader further on the concepts explored in the first book but also vitally helps readers understand the ‘how’.