Getting to know the people behind patient safety: Reflections on two years of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews

Summary

This month marks two years of the hub's Patient Safety Spotlight interview series. Patient Safety Learning's Content and Engagement Manager Lotty Tizzard reflects on the value of sharing personal insights and identifies the key patient safety themes that interviewees have highlighted over the past two years.

Content

The first time I launched Zoom to chat with someone I’d never met about their patient safety journey, I was a little unsure about what to expect. But within minutes, I realised we were onto something good. That first conversation with Josie Gilday, Global Medical Adviser for Save the Children, was rich with experience and insight—from her first encounter with a medication error to what daily skiing in the alps had taught her about assessing risk. Josie’s passion to see local healthcare teams taking ownership of patient safety—often in challenging environments—was inspiring.

We decided to launch the Patient Safety Spotlight series as a way to get to know the people driving patient safety around the world. We set about asking healthcare professionals, researchers, charity leaders and patient campaigners to give us half an hour of their time to tell us what motivates them.

Many interviewees share a personal or professional encounter with the sharp end of patient safety that has been the catalyst for their work or campaigning. For instance, retired NHS consultant Gordon Caldwell spoke about three individual patients he worked with who experienced patient safety incidents and how each one made him think differently about preventing harm. Theatre Scrub Nurse Practitioner Kathy Nabbie told me about the first time she saw a retained surgical swab on an x-ray and how it motivated her to improve surgical safety: "I decided I never wanted to see it again." The patients I have spoken to, including Kath Sansom, Soojin Jun, Marie Lyon and Isabela Castro, are working tirelessly to improve patient safety. Each of them powerfully explained how their personal experience of avoidable harm motivates them to campaign for safer systems, greater transparency and justice for patients and families.

The interviews also offer a unique opportunity to collect insights from many different perspectives, so we always ask what each person is coming across in terms of patient safety challenges and potential solutions they can see. There are a few recurring themes that have come up in Spotlight interviews over the past two years:

• How we communicate is a key factor in keeping patients safe. 
• Treating patients as equal partners in their care is vital, and we must listen to people’s stories if we want to improve the quality and safety of care.
• Workforce pressures have an immense impact on patient and staff safety. Investing in the current and future workforce will be vital if we want to see patient safety improve.
• If staff don’t feel valued or safe to speak up, a culture of cover-up will continue in the healthcare service.
• Changes to patient safety policy and guidance—such as the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) in England—can have a positive impact, but they must be backed up by investment and significant cultural change if they are to succeed.

It is a huge privilege to share the stories of people working on the patient safety frontline. In many ways the Spotlight series embodies the goal of the hub, to draw together different people, experiences and ideas that will help our members learn and collaborate. By bringing these voices together, our hope is that we can enrich our shared understanding of the most pressing patient safety issues. We also hope that each interview will help our readers better understand the pressures the people in the system—patients, staff and leaders—are facing, and challenge them to think about what they can do to make healthcare safer for everyone.

There are now 48 interviews in the series and every person we speak to adds another layer to the picture we are building of the patient safety landscape. With each one, we gain a little more understanding of how we can improve safety for every patient—and, importantly, why it matters.

You can read or watch all of our Patient Safety Spotlight interviews on the hub.

If you work in or campaign for patient safety in any capacity and would like to share your experience as an interview or blog, we’d love to hear from you at content@pslhub.org.