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This qualification is for anyone who wants to carry out incident investigations effectively. Employers, supervisors, SHE champions, union and safety representatives will benefit. Attending the course will enable you to: Independently investigate simple incidents. Gather evidence including conducting witness interviews. Produce an action plan to prevent a recurrence of an incident. Contribute to team investigations for large scale incidents Positively impact the safety culture in your organisation.

Key findings: The nursing staff provided exemplary care to the six patients on the ward; they were compassionate, professional and worked to ensure the patients were provided with the best care possible. The decision to transfer the residents was made quickly on a Friday, and staff had a short time to plan and respond putting together a COVID-ready ward. The patients required full nursing care and deteriorated relatively quickly. Consequently, nurses needed to spend long periods of time at the patients’ bedsides. There was no way for nursing staff to communicate with staff outside the patients’ rooms which increased the frequency of donning and doffing PPE. Full PPE was available to staff at all times. However, there were problems with the usability of the PPE and changes in types of PPE provided, which was stressful for staff.

This HSIB summary report provides an overview of: the referrals caseload under the maternity investigations programme for East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust the themes which were identified as indicative of patient safety risk to mothers and babies the engagement and escalation process that HSIB undertook with the trust and the wider system in response.

This report will set-out our family engagement process. It will also summarise the feedback received to date from the families who have been involved in HSIB investigations. The purpose is to for HSIB to share their family engagement process with other healthcare organisations involved in patient safety investigations and raise awareness of the value of an effective family engagement process in such investigations. The report will: Describe HSIB’s approach to family engagement in our investigations and what has informed our practice. Describe what has worked well in our approach to family engagement. Summarise what families and staff tell us about our approach. Explain what we have learned and plans for future work.

The investigation identified: There is an opportunity to clarify the consent requirements for diagnostic imaging facilitated by a general anaesthetic. There is variation in the information given to patients regarding anaesthesia at the point of referral for an MRI scan under general anaesthetic. The observations and examinations to be routinely performed in pre-anaesthetic assessment are not defined nationally. The investigation found variation in the hospitals it visited. Children coming into hospital for an MRI scan who had been assessed as fit for anaesthetic were perceived as “well” by ward staff. Children with autism, learning disabilities and/or learning difficulties often find clinical environments distressing, which may be reflected in their physiological observations. This may result in diagnostic overshadowing, where problems such as autism (or a medical condition) are attributed as the cause of other new problems, rather than considering other underlying causes, thereby leaving other co-existing conditions potentially undiagnosed. Children with autism, learning disabilities or learning difficulties may benefit from reasonable adjustments being made when attending hospital. Electronic flagging systems can help staff identify patients who may benefit from reasonable adjustments. Hospital passports provide valuable information to assist with implementation of these adjustments. The model of care for learning disability nursing teams is not standardised nationally. There is an opportunity to enhance the existing published guidance available to assist clinicians involved in general anaesthetics to prepare for adverse events in the MRI scanning environment. Professional networks for anaesthetists provide the opportunity for shared learning and consensus regarding best practice. It is challenging to comply fully with the existing published standards for anaesthetic equipment used in MRI environments.

In a blog in the Patient Safety Movement newsletter, James Titcombe talks about his son's death and how speaking out can save lives.

Working with early adopters To test the PSIRF, NHS Improvement are first working with a small number of early adopters who are using an introductory version of the framework in their organisations. This testing phase will be used to inform the creation of a final version of the PSIRF which is anticipated to be published in Spring 2021. At that point, other providers of NHS funded care in England who are not early adopters will also begin adopting the new framework. All NHS organisations are expected to have transitioned to using the new framework from Autumn 2021. Introductory version of the PSIRF While NHS Improvement are not asking organisations other than the early adopters to transition to the PSIRF, they will help providers outside of the early adopter areas to plan for this change. They have therefore published below the introductory version of the framework that is being tested. Organisations and local systems should review this document and begin to think about what they will need to do to prepare ahead of the full introduction of the PSIRF in 2021. Until instructed to change to the PSIRF (likely from Spring 2021), non-early adopter organisations must continue to use the existing Serious Incident Framework.

I read the recent blog from a fellow nurse, ‘Silent witness’, and I too am frustrated with the current system of ‘datixing’. Reporting is a good thing. We must report incidents; we do report incidents to try to keep our patients and staff safe. Many of us, I think, feel comfortable in reporting incidents. However, the frustration with me is different. Yes, the feedback and the way that the reporter gets ‘missed out’ of inquiries is wrong, but the outcomes and the ‘learning’… that is where my frustration lies. I should point out at this stage of my blog; I am raging. I am so angry and frustrated at this system I could scream. I have been a nurse now for over 20 years. I have probably filed hundreds of Datixes over the years. Some I have received feedback on, some I have not. I want to give you an insight on what I see. Not how it should be, not how you think it should be, this is how I see the system working where I am and how it makes me feel. At present I am angry in what I see. Organisational structure Where I work (in an NHS Trust) we have divisions: Medicine, Women and Children, Surgery, etc. Each one of these divisions has a head of nursing who is responsible for the safety and quality of their area, then, moving down the hierarchy, there are the matrons and then the ward managers – these are the people who would ‘investigate’ the incident that has happened, overseen by the safety and quality team (who are non-clinical). Competition time These divisions have meetings. The frontline staff – nurses, doctors, AHPs and support staff – are not invited to these meetings. From being curious, I have determined what goes on in these meetings by shadowing my manager. In these meetings they discuss how many falls, how many acquired infections, how many serious incidents, pitching against each other to see who has performed best or better than last time. So, by investigating the incidents that happen in your division while attempting to keep your numbers for falls, acquired infections and serious incidents low, by untrained investigators, how can these investigations be rigorous and unbiased? In come the safety team. I’ve never met anyone from our safety team. I don’t know where their office is. I wouldn’t know them if they walked past me in the corridor. I have no idea if they have a clinical background, but what I do know is that they do not have experience in what it is like to work in the department where I work. They don’t know the nuances, the culture, the normal deviance of behaviours or the workarounds that we use to get the work done. Perhaps if they understood... Real life examples I would like to share with you a few events to demonstrate how this safety process is not set up to keep patients safe; it's set up to keep the numbers of serious incidents low in that area. As I mentioned earlier, this is how it looks from my lens. Incident 1 – Tracheostomy and laryngectomy patients Looking after patients with tracheostomies or laryngectomies are sometimes tricky. They are high risk patients and require staff to have specialist training to care for them safely. These patients are cared for on specific wards so that patients are cohorted and cared for by staff who look after them on a regular basis. One of these wards was a surgical ward – the ward where I work. There was an incident on this ward with a patient with a tracheostomy. The patient received significant harm and ended up on the intensive care ward as a result. One of the outcomes from this incident was not to have laryngectomy or tracheostomy patients on this ward. At no point was learning from the incident disseminated to staff about the causes of the incident – just remove this cohort of patients from this ward. I don’t know what we did wrong. If the situation arose again, could we do anything different? We will never know as we don’t care for these patients here now. Incident 2 – Swallowed foreign object An incidental finding on a chest X-ray showed that an elderly lady had swallowed her wedding ring. It was stuck in her throat. This finding was found at 23:00 at night. It was removed at 12:00 midday the following day. A Datix report was filed as a concern was raised about the process of out of hours ENT services at my hospital. The investigation was completed. The response was that the incident was downgraded to low and that this lady was not compromised and that the ring was removed safely. This did not address the system failure. If this was a child in our hospital, what is the provision for removing a foreign object from the throat? Opportunity for changing and improving the current system/process was overlooked. Incident 3 – Dehydration death and downgrade A patient undergoing palliative bladder surgery died of dehydration on a ward less that 24 hours post-operation. The patient was not written up for any fluids, was not on a fluid balance chart and was not correctly monitored. Despite gallant efforts to rehydrate the man over the course of the night, the patient had a cardiac arrest and died. This Datix was graded as catastrophic by the reporter, but down graded to low by investigators. When questioned about this, the response was "his surgery was for comfort, he was going to die anyway". Surely anyone post-operation should have fluids written up and be monitored – otherwise what is the point? Again, system failure has been overlooked and opportunities for future learning quashed. The work we do as clinicians is complex. There needs to be an understanding of what we do and why we do it, or, sometimes, why we don’t do it. Investigating harm from an office about procedures and processes you don’t understand is ludicrous. For my friends and family, I will not recommend this hospital I work in. It’s not a case of we don’t learn from mistakes, it’s a case of we don’t want to learn from our mistakes – it's too much effort. I don’t trust them to do the right thing.