Search the hub
Showing results for tags 'Organisational culture'.
Found 1,089 results
-
Content ArticleThe case of Lucy Letby, who was convicted of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of another six in August 2023, has shocked both the public and the healthcare community. In this BMJ editorial, independent investigator Bill Kirkup and James Titcombe, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Watch, outline how the failure to listen to healthcare professionals raising concerns in the case may have contributed to further deaths. They highlight that when doctors at the Countess of Chester Hospital had concerns that they were seeing more deaths than expected, managers failed to take seriously their instinct that there might be a specific underlying cause. The doctors were even pressured into apologising to Letby. They argue that in spite of efforts by the NHS to create a culture where it is safe for staff to speak up about concerns, whistleblowers are still often ostracised and threatened when they highlight patient safety concerns. The article calls for health organisations to adopt the voluntary charter around candour currently being signed by police services and other bodies, pending the implementation of the proposed Public Authorities (Accountability) Bill, which would place a much-needed enduring duty of candour on NHS staff and organisations.
-
Content ArticleThe majority of safety failures in the NHS are caused by bad systems not by malicious or incompetent staff, writes Steve Black in this HSJ opinion piece. The Letby case has provoked plenty of discussion of the way the NHS handles safety critical issues. But there were some hints that the way the case was handled was too typical of how the NHS thinks about safety issues both culturally and procedurally. One part of the issue is how the system resists ideas that work elsewhere, the other is how the standard approach to problems makes learning hard and vastly increases the expense of handling safety errors.
-
Content ArticleTwo years after his 13-year-old child died needlessly in hospital, Paul Laity reflects on life without her. Martha Mills died of septic shock due to a series of serious failures in her care after she injured her pancreas in a cycling accident. Her father Paul talks about the ongoing pain of grief, and the additional burden of knowing that Martha's death was preventable, caused by the complacency of her doctors and a culture in the hospital that meant consultants were reluctant to ask expert advice from paediatric ICU. "Martha’s avoidable death was unusual in that the prime causes weren’t overwork or a lack of resources, but complacency, overconfidence and the culture on the ward. What upsets me most was that the consultants – a different one most days – took a punt that she was going to be OK over the weekend. No one assumed responsibility; they hoped for the best rather than playing safe. Was everything done for Martha that could have been done? Emphatically not. It’s very hard to live with this knowledge. But just as hard is the recognition that I, too, didn’t do enough." Further reading ‘We had such trust, we feel such fools’: how shocking hospital mistakes led to our daughter’s death (The Guardian, 3 September 2022) Prevention of Future Deaths Report: Martha Mills (28 February 2022)
-
Content ArticleIn this blog post, Charlotte Augst looks at the impact of the Lucy Letby conviction on views of patient safety and accountability. The case has brought debates about patient safety into the mainstream media and public consciousness, and rather than focus simply on one extreme case, she believes it is important to look into common patterns in the NHS that lead to harm. She highlights that while such an awful case—where a healthcare professional caused deliberate harm to the most vulnerable patients—is shocking, it is also rare. She outlines a need to focus on the systemic issues that are resulting in repeated harm to patients, particularly in maternity services. Patients continue to be harmed because of rifts between management and clinical staff, the inability of the healthcare and regulatory system to really listen to patients, systemic discrimination and cognitive bias. Charlotte argues that while we may find ourselves focusing on the character of a nurse who committed such heinous crimes, we need to pay equal attention to the normalised behaviours and attitudes that harm patients and take place every day throughout the NHS.
-
Content ArticleIn this letter, Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, calls on the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Steve Barclay MP, to prioritise improving patient safety in the wake of the Lucy Letby trial.
-
Content Article
A Kind Life website
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Suggest a useful website
A Kind Life works with NHS organisations to help them shape a culture that cultivates kindness and nurtures high performance. The company offers a range of training courses and programmes focused on areas such as recruitment, leadership, feedback and conflict resolution. -
Content ArticleFollowing the Lucy Letby case, letters to the Times discuss workplace rights and safety in hospitals. Keith Conradi, former chief investigator, Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch, highlights a current NHS workforce too frightened to raise safety concerns, working in a toxic and bullying culture, where the predominance of HR approaches undermine the culture of safety. And Andrew Harris, professor of coronial law, William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Marys University London, writes that there is a duty on medical practitioners to report the circumstances of a death and not to limit disclosure to avoid investigation. In his letter he questions whether medical examiners across the country are acting independently of their trusts and properly notifying such cases.
-
Content ArticleWe now know that Lucy Letby is a murderer, responsible for the deaths of seven babies and the attempted murders of six more. But as unimaginable as her crimes were, this verdict raises as many questions as it answers. Letby was not working in a vacuum. Could the killings at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have been stopped sooner? Did organisational failures cost the lives of babies who could have been protected? The timeline gives us a clue, writes Minh Alexander, a retired consultant psychiatrist and NHS whistleblower, in this Guardian opinion piece. In June 2016, Letby’s hospital trust commissioned a review of neonatal care by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health after “concerns about increasing neonatal mortality”, which oddly did not feature a case-note review. This prevented detailed examination of the deaths, which should have been the prime objective. The college reported “extremely positive relationships” among staff but “remote” relationships with executives. Astonishingly, the college’s report seemingly did not explicitly acknowledge a possibility of deliberate harm. Nevertheless, the college raised concern that not all deaths were followed by postmortem investigations – as they should have been, according to guidelines – and that where postmortems did take place, they did not include systematic blood tests and toxicology. It noted concerns from obstetrics staff about four unexpected deaths. In the coming days, there will be many questions. Why did it take so long for the hospital to refer matters to the police? Were doctors pressured not to persist with their concerns about Letby? How many trust board members knew there was a possibility of deliberate harm but failed to act?
-
Content ArticleStatistics and key facts about the impact of hydration, nutrition, sleep, and regular breaks on workforce wellbeing.
-
Content ArticleAccording to the last AHPRA Medical Training Survey, a third of doctors in training in the USA had experienced or witnessed bullying, harassment or discrimination in the workplace. The person responsible was usually a colleague and concerningly, only a third of those who witnessed or experienced this behaviour reported it. In this article, Josh Inglis explains why we can’t continue to overlook unprofessional behaviour in our workplace, because doing so is causing harm to ourselves, our patients and the profession, and what we can do about it.
-
Content ArticleThe Fit and Proper Person Test (FPPT) Framework has been developed by NHS England in response to recommendations made by Tom Kark KC in his 2019 review of the FPPT (the Kark Revew). This framework introduces a means of retaining information relating to testing the requirements of the FPPT for individual directors, a set of standard competencies for all board directors, a new way of completing references with additional content whenever a director leaves an NHS board, and extension of the applicability to some other organisations, including NHS England and the CQC. It will help prevent directors who have been involved in or enabled serious misconduct or mismanagement from joining a new NHS organisation.
-
Content ArticleThe aim of the study was to explore the factors that affect the safety attitude and teamwork climate of Cyprus maternity units and Cypriot midwives. The study found that the safety climate in the maternity settings was negative across all six safety climate domains examined. The higher mean total score on team work and safety climate in the more experienced group of midwives is a predominant finding for the maternity units of Cyprus. It could be suggested that younger midwives need more support and teamwork practice, in a friendly environment, to enhance the safety and teamwork climate through experience and self-confidence.
-
Content Article
This policy paper from the Department of Health and Social Care sets out the Government’s response to the recommendations of the Independent Investigation into East Kent Maternity services. -
Community PostI am interested in what colleagues here think about the proposed patient safety specialist role? https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/introducing-patient-safety-specialists/ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/nhs-patient-safety-hospitals-mistakes-harm-a9259486.html Can this development make a difference? Or will it lead to safety becoming one person's responsibility and / or more of the same as these responsibilities will be added to list of duties of already busy staff? Can these specialist be a driver for culture change including embedding a just culture and a focus on safety-II and human factors? What support do trusts and specialists need for this to happen? Some interesting thoughts on this here: https://twitter.com/TerryFairbanks/status/1210357924104736768
- Posted
- 8 replies
-
- (and 11 more)
-
Content ArticleInformation on how sleep and fatigue can impact on the health of staff, with practical recommendations for improving the quality of sleep and rest.
-
Content ArticleAt a recent Patient Safety Management Network meeting, Hester Wain, Head of Patient Safety Policy at NHS England, and Dr Matt Hill, Consultant Anaesthetist, University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust & National Clinical Advisor on Safety Culture at NHS England, presented slides on patient safety culture. Download the presentation slides from the attachment below.
-
Content ArticleImproving patient safety culture – a practical guide, developed in association with the AHSN Network, brings together existing approaches to shifting safety culture as a resource to support teams to understand their safety culture and how to approach improving it. It is intended to be used across health and social care to support everyone to improve the safety culture in their organisation or area. The guide specifically focuses on: teamwork communication just culture psychological safety promoting diversity and inclusive behaviours civility. Teams should use the guide to find a way to start to improve their culture that is most relevant to their local context. It will support teams to explore different approaches to help them to create windows into their daily work to help them to understand their local safety culture.
- Posted
- 1 comment
-
1
-
- (and 5 more)
-
Content ArticleThere are signs that some US healthcare organisations are scoring some successes in addressing the worker morale and retention crisis. But data from Press Ganey surveys shows that there is a widening gap between the most- and least-successful organisations. This article draws lessons from the former. It discusses three key elements needed to engage workers, make them more resilient, and make them feel more aligned with their leaders.
-
Content ArticleHow can we ensure that health and care staff from all backgrounds feel respected, valued and listened to at work? Siva Anandaciva sits down with Karen Bonner, Chief Nurse at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, to talk about the value of having a diverse workforce, and how we can make the health and care system fairer for staff, patients, and communities from ethnic minority groups.
-
Content Article
Safety For All: Parliamentary Reception (13 July 2023)
Mark Hughes posted an article in Improving patient safety
This article provides an overview of a Parliamentary reception, hosted by Carolyn Harris MP, as part of the Safety for All campaign. The event was attended by over 50 guests including MPs, Peers, frontline healthcare professionals, patients and representatives from NHS organisations, regulators, charities, unions and industry. -
Content ArticleThis article forms a section of A guide to good governance in the NHS, published by NHS Providers. Mary Dixon-Woods and Graham Martin contrast problem-sensing with comfort-seeking, confront structural complacency and a lack of eagerness to use hard and soft intelligence, and discuss the crucial importance of openness.
-
Content ArticleThe role of Freedom to Speak Up Guardians is to support staff working in healthcare raise concerns about their workplace. In this report, the National Guardian’s Office provides an overview of the latest annual speaking up data, summarising the themes and learning from information shared by Freedom to Speak Up guardians.
- Posted
- 1 comment
-
1
-
- (and 3 more)
-
Content Article
In a new report analysing healthcare complaint investigations, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) have set out the need for the NHS to do more to accept accountability and learn from mistakes in cases of avoidable harm. This blog sets out Patient Safety Learning’s reflections on this report.- Posted
- 1 comment
-
- (and 9 more)
-
Content ArticleThis report by Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) relates to vascular services provided by Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board following the de-escalation of these services as a Service Requiring Significant Improvement (SRSI). The review outlines that while progress has been made against all nine recommendations made by the Royal College of Surgeons, the health board still has improvements to make.
-
Content ArticleA number of serious concerns were raised about the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, relating to patient safety, governance processes and organisational culture. The Trust has been under review by the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB), following a junior doctor at the trust, Dr Vaishnavi Kumar, taking her own life in June 2022. In response to these concerns, a series of rapid independently-led reviews have been commissioned at the Trust. A follow up report into concerns raised about University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has now been published showing the progress made against the recommendations made in the clinical safety (phase 1) report. It also collates the evidence from phase 2 and 3 of the review and assesses how the lessons learned can at this point be incorporated into the recovery and development plan that the Trust is already progressing. It also takes account of any other concerns that have arisen or been communicated to the review team.
