PatientSafetyLearning Team

A question posed by a delegate at our Patient Safety Learning conference 2019:

'Does your employer praise staff and patients for reporting safety concerns?'

Tell us about your experiences of how reported concerns are received. Does it differ depending on whether they are raised by staff or patients? Are there any examples of great practice you can share where people are really praised for raising patient safety concerns? 

Hi @Catherine Evans, thank you for posing this question. Martin Langham is our topic leader for investigations, @MartinL any thoughts? 

@Ron Daniels is our topic lead on deterioration, so may have some useful insight on this too.

Hi @Faizan I thought you may be interested in a similar post from Claire Cox...

@Claire Cox are you able to comment on any of Faizan's specific points? 

@Claire Cox what are your thoughts and experience? 

@HelenH what do you think? 

A question posed by a delegate at our Patient Safety Learning conference 2019:

'In a publicly funded healthcare system, what role do politicians have in setting culture and improving patient safety?'

What are your thoughts? 

A question posed by a delegate at our Patient Safety Learning Conference 2019:

'How can we change the blame culture without blaming others?'

What are your thoughts? 

@Linda Kenward and @Claire Cox I'm sure you both have valuable experience and insight to offer with this one...

A question posed by a delegate at our Patient Safety Learning Conference 2019:

'As invaluable sources of fresh intelligence, how can we encourage students/learners to become active leaders in patient safety?'

What are your thoughts?

Stephen Moss, Patient Safety Learning Trustee, suggests four practical tips to help staff keep patients safe:

• With your colleagues ask a random selection of patients if they have felt unsafe in the last 24 hours (you might want to select a different form of words). If the answer is yes, get under the skin of why they have felt unsafe, pool the knowledge and agree what action you are going to take, or what might need escalating to your line manager.
• Have a discussion with your colleagues about how you can support each other to uphold your values and professionalism when the going gets tough. Be clear about what help you might need from outside of the team, and follow it up.
• When looking at your Ward Assurance results, satisfy yourself that where it is possible, they are outcome orientated rather than just focusing on compliance with a process. Look for ways of 'humanising' the data i.e. use a language that identifies the impact on patients and, importantly, use language throughout that will be understood by patients and the public. Too many times I see Ward Assurance results on ward corridors, for the attention of patients and families, written in 'NHS speak' !
• When measuring your compliance with the Duty of Candour, don't just look at the numbers! Find a way that also establishes how families feel about the 'quality'  of the response, i.e. was it open, honest and transparent and did it give what they needed.

How do you think these tips could benefit your patients or service users? Have you tried anything similar that you've found has really helped? Let us know your thoughts and please feedback if you try any of them.