Chris W

Found this a very interesting and helpful overview of where the NHS is now, how it arrived there and the future challenges.

There is a plan to conduct a survey on the roles, terms of engagement, remuneration, expenses being carried out rather than what the spec might have been when advertised which is to be progressed next week

This is an interesting piece from which, in my experience, the reality is very different from “From a review of the job description, the PSP appears to be a policy and governance oversight role. PSPs might have been a much more valuable addition to the NHS if they had been asked to become involved in the creation of safer tools and therapeutic services that patients would eventually use.” This not what has happened. Feed-back from the Patient Safety Partners Network (with 66 members hosted by Patient Learning) and four months of monthly calls is that the range and variety of roles and terms of engagement of PSP’s is extremely wide. Some are working in an oversite role but some are collecting patient stories. What is obvious is that there is a need for PSPs at every possible level in NHS providers.

It might be true that “It is really centred around staff–their availability, skills and capabilities, and their ability to effectively communicate with each other and their patients.” However. the ambitions in the NHS Strategy for engaging patients in patient care and investigations has been so big a change that it has made space and given opportunity for disruptors in the system. Those, including PSPs, who follow Professor Richard “Feynman’s adage “Experiment, Fail, Learn and Repeat” are now doing just that. There is little doubt that implementation of PSRIF has been far from easy, and continues to be a challenge, but maybe in a year or two the benefits will have been far reaching just so long as it is allowed to continue to innovate and attempt to put patients first and foremost.

After just over seven months as a Patient Safety Partner I have moved from being amazed at my trust's negative approach to patient engagement to optimistic but there a so many barriers in the system that it will not be easy for the reasons you have set out

As a managing director of a reasonable sized building and civil engineering business. I considered spending two days a week out walking the sites, meeting the teams and challenging them about their ideas for doing things differently or not.

In my trust the top "issue" found from analysis of data in connection with "Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) and NHS Resolution (NHSR) Learning from Litigation Claims" was "communications". I have no detail on this but suspect that this is what the problem really is.

Sadly the only sensible conclusion is that society is failing to deliver a safe healthcare system.

The excellent thing about this report is that it points out that patient safety being first and foremost requires getting so many practical actions right - not just saying patient safety comes first.

In the commercial world saying putting profit as a priority, as many businesses do, is also meaningless when delivering on that requires getting so many practical actions right.

The HSIB World Sleep Day event on 17 March 2023 was first class especially with examples of rail, ship and air examples. Since then I have tried to find examples of health providers who have fatigue on their risk register and found only one. 

In my engagement and enquires in the Buckingham, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West OCS are I have found no reflection of  Women’s Health Strategy for England in policy and plans though after hearing about it from me I am assured that this will change. Kings Fund commentary on this predicted that this was likely to be the case and encouraged all who are aware of this to promote it.