Improve your standards by meeting ours: Introducing an evidence-based way to deliver safer patient care

Summary

Patient Safety Learning has developed a unique set of patient safety standards, resources and tools to help organisations not only establish clearly defined patient safety aims and goals, but also support their delivery and demonstrate achievement. This page provides an overview of our Standards with links to further information.

Content

Why Standards?

Patient Safety Learning believes that health and social care organisations need to have standards for patient safety. These can inform 'what good looks like' and enable organisations to self-assess against them.

Standards provide a framework for prioritising and developing transformational change programmes to ensure patient safety is a core purpose.

Those Standards now exist.

Organisations are legally required to take ‘all reasonable and practical steps’ to improve safety. Yet, these WHO-sourced figures evidence a failure in this ambition.

(Source: World Health Organization, Patient Safety, 13 September 2019. http://who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/patient-safety)

One of the primary reasons for such shocking statistics is that organisations don’t have standards for patient safety in the way they do for other safety issues. Those that they do have are insufficient and inconsistent.

Patient Safety Learning believes that all health and social care organisations must have access to comprehensive patient safety standards that they can adopt and implement to meet their legal and moral obligations. Doing so would deliver the following benefits:

• safer, quality patient care, consistently delivered
• an assurance that patient safety sits at the organisation’s core
• demonstration of leadership and organisational commitment
• improved governance via a strengthened risk management system and approach
• improved performance through the delivery of greater efficiencies and increased effectiveness
• the ability for patients and families, funders and communities to identify and differentiate good safety providers
• reassurance to regulators.

How our Standards can work for you?

Since Patient Safety Learning was founded in 2018, we have been engaging with organisations looking to support improved patient safety.

A consistent theme fed back to us has been the need to have access to expert advice to help them become true learning organisations in a reliable safety system.

More specifically, how they can:

The Standards that we have developed in response are based on 20 years of research, as well as learning from inquiries, policy and good practice from healthcare, both in the UK and internationally.

What our Standards cover

Based on our original research and policy document A Blueprint for Action (2018), Patient Safety Learning has identified seven Foundations for patient safety:

• Leadership and governance
• Culture
• Shared learning
• Professionalisation of patient safety
• Patient engagement
• Data and insight
• Delivery of patient safety services

Each of these Foundations is supported by specific patient safety Aims, totalling 26 across all seven.

Underpinning each Foundation and Aim, there are a series of clearly defined Standards that explain what an organisation must do to deliver against their specific requirements. For each Standard, there are details of evidence-based outputs, outcomes and behaviours required to enable an organisation to demonstrate achievement against those Standards.

In total, there are 144 identified Standards. These represent the core for any organisational safety improvement strategy and delivery plan.

How you can access our standards

At their simplest, the Standards come in two printed forms: a manual defining ‘What Good Looks Like’ for patient safety, plus supporting summary reference booklet.

The manual details every aspect of our safety Foundations, Aims and constituent Standards and explains what an organisation must do to deliver against the requirements of each. In particular, it covers the necessary, supportive outputs and evidence, as well as desired outcomes and behaviours that an organisation will wish to see as a result.

Each of the Standards is identified against our three-level Accreditation Framework ranking of: Essential; Enhanced; Exemplary.

The summary booklet that accompanies the manual can be used as a quick reference guide, high-level practical evaluation aid, or training support component.

A core resource for using our Standards is our unique, easy-to-use online self-assessment toolkit.

Pre-populated with our patient safety Foundations, Aims and Standards, the toolkit includes all necessary and supportive evidence-based outputs, plus desired outcomes and behaviours.

It has been designed to capture self-assessment scores, as well as record the basis of assessments, identify goals for improvement and enable relevant documentation to be uploaded. A specific feature is its ability to act as an actions-planning tool, supporting the development of improvement plans, as well as outcome and measurement frameworks.

Practical support for improvement and impact

Our Standards are practical and outcomes-focused, not a tick-box methodology. Their role can vary depending on where an organisation is on its patient safety journey and what its ambitions are.

A stand-alone self-assessment resource

One of the main objectives behind our development of the Standards was to provide an easy-to-use, stand-alone patient safety resource.

The Standards enable organisations to self-assess their current patient safety performance, identifying both strengths and weaknesses. The outputs can form the basis for a comprehensive patient safety strategy, as well as the foundations for evidence-based improvement programmes.

Additionally, Patient Safety Learning’s consultants and advisers are available to provide implementation assistance, as well as interpretation guidance around the Standards and tailored to an organisation’s specific needs.

A core driver for patient safety improvement

The Standards can also fulfil a much broader role, underpinning and helping to direct a systems-wide change framework.

Supplemented by Patient Safety Learning’s suite of consulting products and services, the Standards can inform and improve all aspects of an organisational patient safety improvement programme. This can include senior leadership awareness, understanding and commitment; staff education, training and delivery; internal and external communications and engagement. All supported by resources and guidance on wider patient safety-related issues.

Client experience demonstrates that working in partnership with Patient Safety Learning and supported by our Standards can contribute significantly to success. (Click here for the GOSH case study.)

For further information

If you would like to know more about our Standards and/or other services and support available to you from Patient Safety Learning, please contact us at: hello@patientsafetylearning.org.

• Read our Standards brochure.
• Read more about how the Standards were developed. 
• You can find a list of frequently asked questions concerning the Standards and online self-assessment toolkit.