Summary
Our free platform for patient safety – the hub – was launched in 2019 with the aim of sharing learning for safer care. We now have members from all around the world, and many are helping to shape the hub by sharing their patient safety insights through blogs, interviews, tools and practical examples.
In this Top picks, we showcase some of our international contributions, and celebrate our ever-growing network of people who are passionate about reducing avoidable harm.
Content
From the United States
1. Diagnostic errors and delays: why quality investigations are key
Dan Cohen, international consultant in patient safety and clinical risk management, and Trustee for Patient Safety Learning, looks at the challenges around diagnostic error and delay,
3. A complex adaptive systems approach to patient safety
Kumar Subramaniam, CEO at SafeTower, argues that it is time to reimagine safety event reporting and management solutions that guide, not prescribe, investigations and improvement actions.
4. Patient Safety Spotlight interview with Soojin Jun, Co-founder of Patients for Patient Safety US
Soojin Jun talks explains how her personal experience of harm motivated her to work in healthcare and campaign for patient safety, the power of collaboration in improving healthcare safety and how healthcare workers can take steps to improve their own patient interactions.
5. Harmful attitudes towards gynae surgery as a discipline – a risk to patient safety
An interview with US-based gynaecology surgeon Jocelyn Fitzgerald, looking at the knock-on patient safety issues caused by negative attitudes towards her specialty.
Tambre discusses how effective communication is essential for ensuring patient safety in clinical trials and cancer care, and why poor communication can lead to negative outcomes.
Olivia Lounsbury, Committee Lead for Patients for Patient Safety US's National Patient Safety Oversight committee, looks at a new Bill calling for the creation of a US National Patient Safety Board (NPSB).
From Africa
1. The 'Minutes of the Minute': a blog by Ehi Iden - OSHAfrica
Ehi Iden discusses the importance of documenting and learning from patient safety incidences. Using a fictional story to draw parallels from, Ehi highlights how accountability, leadership and reporting incidences will help us keep staff and patients safe.
2. Friends of African Nursing (FoAN): Training perioperative nurses across Africa
FoAN's Chair of Trustees Kate Woodhead describes the challenges facing nurses working in perioperative care in many African countries.
3. 'Mind the Implementation Gap': the challenges facing Ethiopia
Yakob Seman Ahmed reflects on Patient Safety Learning's recent report 'Mind the implementation gap: The persistence of avoidable harm in the NHS' and the similar challenges Ethiopia faces in implementing its own standards and policies.
4. Patient Safety Spotlight interview with Chidiebere Ibe, medical illustrator and medical student
Chidiebere Ibe is passionate about increasing representation of Black people in all forms of medical literature. In this interview, he explains how lack of representation at all levels of the healthcare system leads to disparities in healthcare experiences and outcomes.
5. Spotlight on Sudan: How can we improve healthcare services during war?
From his observations of healthcare conditions in Sudan, Dr Ahmed Khalafalla presents some ideas on how we can improve healthcare services during times of war and uncertainty to make healthcare services accessible for those who need them.
6. Preventing patient falls in healthcare settings: The need for fall risk assessment
Patient falls are a significant concern in healthcare settings, often leading to severe injuries, prolonged hospital stays and increased healthcare costs. This blog from Augustine Kumah, Deputy Quality Manager at The Bank Hospital, Accra, Ghana, explores the significance of fall risk assessment, its implementation and its role in reducing fall-related incidents in healthcare settings.
Across Uganda, patients are increasingly experiencing infections that no longer respond to commonly used antibiotics. Conditions that were once easily treatable now require longer hospital stays, repeated courses of treatment and higher out-of-pocket expenditure. In this blog, Annet Naguudi, Regina Kamoga and Joshua Wamboga from the Uganda Alliance of Patients’ Organizations (UAPO) argue that strengthening AMS in Uganda requires placing patients at the centre of the response and highlights the strategic positioning of the UAPO to lead this shift in line with national and global priorities.
From Australia
1. #NavigatingHealth—Enabling every patient, every time, system-wide
In this blog, Siân Slade shares how, through her research interest into the difficulties of navigating the healthcare system in Australia, she created a policy and advocacy project: #NavigatingHealth. The aims of the project are to streamline the silos and address the fragmentation of healthcare by bringing together all those who are developing solutions to enable patients and carers to better navigate healthcare journeys.
2. “Listening to a patient’s history for longer can help doctors make the right diagnosis”
Mary Dahm and Carmel Crock tell us more about their research to explore the relationship between communication and diagnostic accuracy.
3. Professional regulation and patient safety systems: parallel planets or partners in improvement?
Martin Fletcher has been part of transformational change in professional regulation through his tenure as Chief Executive of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra). Martin shares Australia's regulatory journey and reflects on the UK's more gradual path to reforming their legislative frameworks. He highlights both countries' shared common goals and the challenges faced along the way. He ends the blog with three priorities for future action: integrating professional regulation into system safety, better use of data to anticipate risk and embedding equity and cultural safety.
More international insights…
1. ‘Knowledge is the driver of change and will make a difference': a blog from Peter Lachman
Peter, Lead of the Faculty Quality Improvement Programme, Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, explains why safety must be embedded into what we do every day, not what we do only after harm has occurred, and why we need to constantly ask ourselves “what do we need to do to be safe?”
2. Patient Safety Spotlight interview with Isabela Castro, patient advocate
Isabela is from Brazil and in this interview shares how her experience of losing her baby daughter to avoidable harm in 2006 led to her involvement in patient safety advocacy, and talks about the vital role of patient campaigners in driving the movement to reduce avoidable harm.
Roohil talks to us about the vital role of pharmacists in making sure medications help patients, rather than causing harm and highlights the global threat of substandard and counterfeit medicines.
4. Mother knows best – a blog by Dr Abha Agrawal
Dr Abha Agrawal shares with the hub her family's experience of going into hospital in India, and demonstrates how patients and families can be true partners in patient safety.
5. The patient's chair: a blog by Dr Faisal Saeed
Dr Faisal Saeed, a doctor in the Maldives, talks about the patient-provider power imbalance using an AI generated image of two chairs to illustrate his points.
Josie tells us about the nursing error that first sparked her interest in patient safety, how a just culture helps healthcare workers and systems learn from their mistakes, and how her love of skiing has inspired her to think differently about risk in healthcare.
7. Treading around level 3: Time for a paradigm shift in patient safety?
Dr Abdulelah Alhawsawi, Abdominal Organs Transplant and Hepato-biliary Surgeon, and Director General of the Saudi Patient Safety Center, discusses why hospitals are falling short of safe care levels. He believes healthcare continues to be structurally weak when it comes to the safety conditions and suggests that there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift in the way we think about patient safety and how we implement it while providing healthcare. In his essay, Dr Alhawsawi proposes four practical solutions.
8. The power of being heard in healthcare (a blog by Risa Mallory)
Risa Mallory, a retired psychotherapist from Canada, talks about the importance of listening in healthcare, and how patient voices play a critical role in ensuring safety, quality and fairness.
9. Patient safety in humanitarian settings
This blog describes the challenges faced in assuring patient safety in humanitarian settings and offers suggestions for how international medical aid organisations can build patient safety systems.
10. How a charity in France is supporting intensive care units: An interview with Anne-Sophie Debue
In this interview, Anne-Sophie Debue tells us about the 101 Fund in France, a charity that develops projects to support intensive care units, and a tool that they have developed, LifeMapp, which supports patients and their families during and after intensive care.
Stefan Peil, a healthcare consultant in Germany, summarises a pilot study he has done to see whether a structured systems model can support the preparation of a morbidity and mortality (M&M) conference discussion.
12. The ant that moves the elephant: a lesson in building safer reporting cultures
Saed Saleh Abed, a risk management supervisor at the Royal Commission Health Services Program (RCHSP) in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, discusses how a single report—no matter how minor—can challenge an assumption and shift an entire system toward safer care.
Join the hub
Do you have insights to share around patient safety? Are you a member of the hub? Why not join our global community today (it’s free and easy to sign up) and submit an article or share a resource? You can also contact the editorial team at [email protected].
Could you be an international Topic leader for the hub?
We are looking for someone based outside of the UK, with expertise in an area of patient safety to join our team of volunteer Topic leaders.
Our topic leaders are an integral part of ensuring the value of content on the hub. We want to ensure that quality content is published on the hub and that we have credible experts in specific topic areas to
- contribute personal blogs sharing expertise and insights
- advise us on the validity of posted content
- suggest areas to develop content in
- lead and respond to discussions within our communities.
If you’d like to apply to become a topic please visit our Topic leader page where you’ll find a job description and application form.
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