Patient Safety Spotlight interview with Judy Walker, Senior Business Consultant, iTS Leadership

Summary

This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to different people about their role and what motivates them to make health and social care safer.

Judy talks to us about the power of After Action Reviews (AARs) to promote learning and bring about lasting improvements in healthcare. She also discusses the opportunity that the new Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) offers to take a more people-focused approach to learning from patient safety incidents.

Content

About the author

Judy is an international expert in the After Action Review (AAR) approach, having been part of the first AAR education programme at University College London Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in 2009, and has since conducted large numbers of AARs and trained hundreds of people to use the approach successfully.

After 34 years in the NHS, she joined iTS Leadership Ltd in 2019 to be able to take her expertise to NHS hospitals across the UK and into international corporate businesses and other sectors. Judy joined the NHS as a Hospital Play Specialist (HPS), pioneering the approach and growing the play service within the hospital where she worked, from one person to 18 HPS. Clinically, she pioneered the role of the HPS in the radiotherapy department, dental hospital setting and neonatal unit.