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Showing results for tags 'System safety'.
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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.
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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.
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Content ArticleIn the early 21st century, the patient safety movement began to talk about system safety. Recognising that people are inherently fallible, advocates for patient safety proposed that it was wrong to blame individual clinicians for poorly designed systems that were full of error traps. However, in a 2013 BMJ editorial, Kaveh G Shojania and Mary Dixon-Woods argue that we must also take seriously the performance and behaviours of individual clinicians if we are to make healthcare safer for patients. They draw on research showing that ‘bad apples’—individuals who repeatedly display incompetent or grossly unprofessional behaviours—clearly exist. This is never more evident than today, when we read about the conviction of nurse Lucy Letby.
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Content ArticleAlthough well-established principles exist for improving the timeliness and efficiency of care, many organisations struggle to achieve more than small-scale, localised gains. Where care processes are complex and include segments under different groups' control, the elegant solutions promised by improvement methodologies remain elusive. This study, published in BMJ Quality and Safety, sought to identify common design flaws that limit the impact of flow initiatives.
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Content ArticleWhile there is much potential and promise for the use of artificial intelligence in improving the safety and efficiency of health systems, this can at times be weakened by a narrow technology focus and by a lack of independent real-world evaluation. It should be expected that when AI is integrated into health systems, challenges to safety will emerge, some old, and some novel. In this chapter of the book Safety in the Digital Age: Sociotechnical Perspectives on Algorithms and Machine Learning, Mark Sujan argues that to address these issues, a systems approach is needed for the design of AI from the outset. He draws on two examples to help illustrate these issues: Design of an autonomous infusion pump and Implementation of AI in an ambulance service call centre to detect out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
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Content ArticleThe Covid-19 public inquiry has been in the news recently, with former Chancellor George Osborne and ex Prime Minister David Cameron denying that austerity policies in the UK before the pandemic weakened how prepared the NHS was for such a crisis. In this blog, published by the Nuffield Trust, Leonora Merry and Sally Gainsbury take a closer look at how true this is.
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Content ArticleThis book, edited by Chartered Health Psychologist Holly Blake, demonstrates the breadth of research on work, health and wellbeing, during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, covering workforce impacts and workforce interventions in various countries and settings. Learning from this research will help to build global preparedness for future pandemics and foster resilience for responding in times of crisis and uncertainty.
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Content ArticleThis investigation aims to improve patient safety by supporting healthcare staff in a surgical setting to select and insert the appropriate type of implant (vascular graft) for haemodialysis treatment. The Healthcare and Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) explored the factors that affect the ability of staff to safely select and insert vascular grafts for haemodialysis treatment. The national investigation focused on: The identification of factors within the healthcare system as a whole that influence patient safety risks associated with the selection and insertion of vascular grafts in an operating theatre environment. Exploration, using a systems approach, of the design of labelling and packaging used for the different types of vascular grafts for patients on haemodialysis treatment. Exploration of the impact on operating theatre teams of staff redeployment and repurposing of working environments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleClive Flashman, Patient Safety Learning's Chief Digital Officer, shares his presentation slides from the Health Plus Care 2022 conference. The presentation slides include basic principles, how to involve the patient and public in design, key issues and Clive's ten top tips for digital health innovators.
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Community PostHi everybody This is Jaione from Spain (we are in the North, Basque Region) and i am a nurse working in collaboration with the Patient Safety Team in our local NHS (Basque Health Service). First of all, I would like to congratulate the team for this hub which i think is a wonderful idea. Secondly, i would like to apologize for the language, since, although i lived in England many years ago, that is not the case anymore and I'm afraid i don't speak as well as I used to. I would like to comment a problem that we encounter very often in our organization which is related to patient's regular medications when they are admitted to hospital. We do have online prescriptions for both acute and community settings but the programs don't really speak to each other so, for example, if I take a blood pressure pill everyday and i get admitted into hospital, chances are that my blood pressure tablet won't get prescribed during my in-hospital stay. The logical thing to do would be to change both online systems so they communicate to each other, but that's not possible at the moment. I wanted to ask whether other systems have the same problem and, if so, if there is any strategy implemented to alleviate this issue. I hope i have expressed myself as clearly as possible. Thanks very much once more for this hub! Kind regards Jaione
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Community PostHi I have been working in a presentation we are giving at ASPiH in November around the work we have done using simulation to test systems and processes. we have done this in two ways. Firstly as a by-product of an educational in situ simulation in s clinical environment where a latent threat has been identified. In this case we will work with the area in looking at just what contributes to the threat and ways that may help. The second way (and with my HF head on, more exciting) has been setting out to test a process. We have done this several times now and have had some real successes in demonstrating the work as done v work as imagined theory. has anyone else used simulation in this way? looking forward to your replies. Phil
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Community Post
Near misses
Claire Cox posted a topic in Investigations, risk management and legal issues
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Do any areas of healthcare capture ALL near misses and act on them? What systems do you use? -
Community Post
How nurses can spot and report error traps and near misses
HelenH posted a topic in Stories from the front line
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How can nurses spot error traps and near misses so that Trusts can learn, respond and take action to prevent unsafe care? What are the barriers to nurses using their insight and where is the good practice that we can share? Any ideas, anyone?- Posted
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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.
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Content ArticleOffering a concise yet comprehensive review of current practices in surgery and patient safety, Handbook of Perioperative and Procedural Patient Safety is a practical resource for practicing surgeons, anaesthesiologists, surgical nurses, hospital administrators, and surgical office staff. Edited by Drs. Juan A. Sanchez and Robert S. D. Higgins and authored by expert contributors from Johns Hopkins, it provides an expansive look at the scope of the problem, causes of error, minimising errors, surgical suite and surgical team design, patient experience, and other related topics.
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Content ArticleDo you ever feel like you keep addressing the same healthcare issue over and over again, only to have it resurface? It can be frustrating to focus on individual symptoms or parts of the system and not see any lasting change. This is where systems thinking comes in - a holistic approach that allows you to see the bigger picture and understand how different parts of a system interact with each other. Find out more in this blog from Tara Thornton for the FutureNHS Community.
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Content ArticleWhat exactly is machine learning and how is it being used in healthcare? Are machines always better than a person? How do we know? In this interview, Patient Safety managing editor, Caitlyn Allen asks these questions of artificial intelligence healthcare researcher Dr Avishek Choudhury.
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Content ArticleStructured into four major sections this white paper, from the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors, helps you learn background information and context for the role of people in barrier systems. It sets out concerns about the way human and organisational factors are currently treated in some approaches to barrier management and in Bowtie Analysis in particular.
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"I am thirty miles south of London’s Gatwick Airport, the world’s busiest single-runway airport, when one of the seven Flight Control computers in my Airbus A320 aircraft fails . . . ’ So begins this pioneering book by Niall Downey – a cardio-thoracic surgeon who retrained to become a commercial airline pilot – where he uses his expertise in medicine and aviation to explore the critical issue of managing human error. With further examples from business, politics, sport, technology, education and other fields, Downey makes a powerful case that by following some clear guidelines any organisation can greatly reduce the incidence and impact of making serious mistakes. While acknowledging that in our fast-paced world getting things wrong is impossible to avoid completely, Downey offers a strategy based on current best practice that can make a massive difference. He concludes with an aviation-style Safety Management System that can be hugely helpful in preventing avoidable catastrophes from occurring. -
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Our heavily curated Instagram society has become very intolerant of error. In an era where everything we present is airbrushed, tweaked, filtered and polished before being released into the wild, we labour under the misapprehension that the real world is similar. We are sadly mistaken. The real world is messy, imperfect and error-prone. In this blog, Niall Downey talks about his book, Oops! Why Things Go Wrong, which explores why error is inevitable, how it affects many different industries and areas of society, sometimes catastrophically, how it is sometimes actually quite efficient from a physiological standpoint and, most importantly, what we can do about it. -
Content ArticleThis study in the Journal of Patient Safety outlines the development of the Leapfrog composite patient safety score. The researchers aimed to develop a composite patient safety score that provides patients, healthcare providers and healthcare purchasers with a standardised method to evaluate patient safety in general acute care hospitals in the United States. The study concluded that the composite score reflects the best available evidence regarding a hospital’s efforts and outcomes in patient safety.
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Content ArticleThe Cynefin® sense-making Framework, brainchild of innovative thinker Dave Snowden, empowers leaders across organizations, governments, and local communities, to work with uncertainty – to navigate complexity, create resilience, and thrive. As Snowden says, “The Framework guides us to make sense of the world, so that we can skillfully act in it.”
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Content ArticleNew research showed how a national quality improvement programme called PReCePT (Preventing Cerebral Palsy in Pre Term labour) accelerated maternity units’ use of Magnesium sulphate for pre-term labour. The programme could serve as a blueprint for future efforts to get clinical guidelines into practice in other areas of care. The quality improvement programme involved training staff on the benefits of magnesium sulphate, and having a local midwife dedicated to encouraging and monitoring use of the medicine at their maternity unit. The programme was supported by Academic Health Science Networks (a regional and national organisation that encourages improvement and innovation in healthcare). This article from the National Institute for Health and Care Research provides a plain English summary and short film about the project.
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Content ArticleThis review published by the Modernisation Agency explores ‘social movements’ as a new way of thinking about large-scale systems change and assesses the potential contribution of applying this new perspective to NHS improvement programmes. This review has four objectives: to explore ‘social movements’ as a new way of thinking about large-scale systems change; to assess the potential contribution of applying this new perspective to NHS improvement; to enrich and extend NHS thinking in relation to large-scale, system wide change; and to begin to establish a research and evidence base to support the emergence of an improvement movement in the NHS.
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Content ArticleIn this article, published by the British Journal of Nursing, John Tingle, Lecturer in Law, discusses recently published patient safety reports including Patient Safety Learning's Mind the Implementation Gap. Tingle concludes: "The two reports discussed here (Patient Safety Learning, 2022; Martin et al, 2023) show that 10 years after Francis (2013) there has been some improvement in NHS patient safety. This can be termed ‘measured improvement’, but this has been no big-bang trajectory. The arguments advanced in both reports need to be discussed more widely, and they provide an excellent basis for patient safety reform."
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