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In this blog, Professor of Medical Education Kate Owen explains how her team has embedded a session on patient safety in the final year curriculum at Warwick Medical School. Using a real-life story posted on the Care Opinion website, the session gives medical students an opportunity to use investigation tools, understand NHS reporting systems and consider the importance of compassionate communication with harmed patients and their families.

This blog captures a recent discussion at a Patient Safety Management Network (PSMN) meeting, where members of the network raised a number of important questions and issues relating to the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). PSIRF is currently being rolled out across all NHS trusts in England and takes a new approach to investigating patient safety incidents.

The Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service is the NHS's new system for the recording and analysis of patient safety events. Very little research had been done before to understand the best ways to make sure patients, service users and their families can give their views on safety incidents, for the whole NHS to learn from. Learning from patients’ experiences and how they feel about the care they have received is known to be a very good way to make healthcare services better. However, getting the right information from people in the right way, and making sure the right NHS staff see it and can act on it, is difficult to do. This Show and Tell outlines the research completed to understand how we can do this better through the introduction of the LFPSE service. Audience: This is a publicly open event for anyone interested in understanding the work that NHS England has completed into understanding the best ways to make sure patients, service users and their families can give their views on safety incidents, for the whole NHS to learn from. Speakers: Lucie Mussett Patient Safety Lead & Senior Product Manager for the Learn from patient safety events (LFPSE) service Hope Bristow – Senior User Centred Designer (Informed Solutions) Natasha Hughes – User Researcher (Informed Solutions) Register

This two-day King's Fund conference aims to explore how the current strain on services makes listening to people more difficult but even more important, at a time when public satisfaction with the NHS is at an all-time low. Join us to hear about how you can make sure building in the user voice is routine and core to the business of the health and care system, not just ‘a nice to have’. Conference sessions will: discuss how the NHS and social care cannot deliver quality unless listening to patients and carers, and acting on their feedback, lies at the heart of its culture.   provide learning on how to listen well and what meaningful engagement with people and communities looks like. Gain insight into the findings from the Fund’s project on understanding integration with the HOPE (Heads of Patient Experience) network by working with six sites on an action learning piece. Learn about how health and social care decision-makers cannot overcome challenges and answer long-term questions alone - such as how the system will address the deep inequalities and how it can adapt to provide the joined-up, efficient care that people want and gives them more control – public input is crucial. Join peers to share learning on grasping this opportunity to finish building a culture where listening to patients, service-users, and communities is everyone's business.   Register

The benefits of giving patients a central role in developing healthcare solutions have been widely demonstrated, but meaningful engagement is still far too rare, particularly in digital healthcare. In this blog for World Patient Safety Day 2023, Clive Flashman, Chief Digital Officer at Patient Safety Learning, looks at the benefits and barriers to engaging patients in developing digital healthcare solutions. He looks at why healthcare innovators struggle to include patients at an early stage of development and suggests some ways that NHS England could help facilitate coproduction through its existing patient engagement and innovation structures.

This virtual masterclass will build confidence in compassionately engaging and involving families and loved ones to work within the requirements of PSIRF and the Complaints Standards Framework. But more than this, the masterclass will support staff to go beyond compliance to understand the issues and emotional component on a deeper level; to have real authentic engagement and involvement with patients and families. New frameworks such as PSIRF are now in place, but how do we not only comply with these, but go beyond compliance to have real authentic compassionate engagement and involvement with patients, families and indeed staff to make a real positive difference? Connecting new knowledge with emotions can really support long term learning, which is an important part of this masterclass. Knowing things may have gone wrong can feel a heavy burden and a complex emotional situation to be managing. Often, we avoid visiting difficult emotions in others, as well as ourselves, because we don’t feel confident or skilled, or we feel fearful of not doing it perfectly. This one-day masterclass will look at the new PSIRF and the Complaints Standards Framework and through real life content, bringing the human focus for the patients, loved ones, and indeed staff to the forefront. It will support staff to explore what compassionate engagement looks like, feels like, and how to communicate it authentically and meaningfully. In a supportive and relaxed environment, delegates will have the opportunity to gain in depth knowledge of the emotional component, relate to, analyse and realise the significance of and believe in their own abilities in creating practices that not only support the PSIRF but go beyond compliance to be working in a way that supports gaining an optimum outcome for patients, families and staff, in often a less than optimum situation. Key learning objectives: Feel, analyse, and explore the presence and absence of compassionate engagement within life, trauma, and a healthcare incident and how empathy is the gateway to compassion. Seeing perspectives and understanding emotional motivations and the emotional component recognising vulnerability in others and self. Seeing the bigger picture and having an enquiring mind to understand the story and how the ‘Funnel of Life’ can impact on our ability to engage. Build confidence in the positive impact of compassionate engagement and really being authentically interested in the emotional component to be able to create an optimum outcome in often a less than optimum situation. Explore and have a good grasp of how internal unconscious belief systems, can link through to the outcomes we achieve. We know what works with compassionate engagement, but why do we so often struggle? Explore and analyse biases, judgments, and how a lack of compassionate engagement not only has the potential to cause psychological harm, but can prevent optimum outcomes for the organisation. Realise the significance of authenticity rather than feeling fearful of not doing things perfectly. Examine where can we get emotional information from to support us, even if we are not aware we are doing it! Identify the importance of an enquiring mind and a hypothesis as we try and understand the story that we are aiming to compassionately engage with. Develop understanding of Safeguarded Personal Resolution (SPR ®) to formulate compassionate engagement under PSIRF and the Complaints Standards Framework. Develop awareness on personal wellbeing and resilience. Register hub members receive a 20% discount. Email info@pslhub.org for discount code.