A fully independent ‘Guardian Service’ is being launched for the North Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (NEP) where staff can discuss any matters relating to service users care and safety, whistleblowing, bullying and harassment, and work grievances in complete confidence.
Come and visit our first pop-up library at Severn Fields, Shrewsbury 19th July 11.00am-3.00pm. Join the library, borrow and return books, get help finding information and evidence, set up an Athens account, find out what the library can do for you and your team.
In hospitals, breakdowns in communication has been found to be a major source of errors.1 Communication between clinicians can occur at scheduled times or rounds, through face-to-face meetings or may be facilitated through the use of communication tools such as pagers. For the latter, often urgent communication between clinicians about a patient is required. Problems in communication can result in a failure to rescue or result in poor coordination of care. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
Quality and patient safety are the highest priorities of provider boards. NHS providers will have noticed a renewed national focus on building cultures of safety and improvement across NHS organisations, and greater proficiency at learning from mistakes and spreading good practice.
Despite a strong reporting culture in trusts, evidenced by over 1.8 million entries into the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) last year, widespread translation of reporting into routine learning and demonstrable improvement has yet to happen.
We have announced today the appointment of Dame Eileen Sills, the Chief Nurse at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, as the first National Guardian for speaking up safely in the NHS.
The CQC has published a focused report on the safety of one ward at South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust following an inspection in December 2017.
Measurement is a vital part of improvement work. While it is known that the context of improvement work influences its success, less is known about how context affects measurement of underlying harms. We sought to explore the use of a harm measurement tool, the NHS Safety Thermometer (NHS-ST), designed for use across diverse healthcare settings in the particular context of community care.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
We've added 10 new Be Aware updates following your suggestions:
Musculoskeletal ; Osteoporosis ; Nutrition and obesity ; Falls ; HR ; Research Methods ; Information Governance ; Bladder, bowel and pelvic healthcare ; Rheumatology ; Medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency (circulated email)
Open access. The Primary Care Patient Measure of Safety (PC PMOS) is designed to capture patient feedback about the contributing factors to patient safety incidents in primary care. It required further reliability and validity testing to produce a robust tool intended to improve safety in practice.
In a national report published today, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) found that too many people are being injured or suffering unnecessary harm because NHS staff are not supported by sufficient training, and because the complexity of the current patient safety system makes it difficult for staff to ensure that safety is an integral part of everything they do.
Free access. Despite consensus that preventing patient safety events is important, measurement of safety events remains challenging. This is, in part, because they occur relatively infrequently and are not always preventable. There is also no consensus on the ‘best way‘ or the ‘best measure’ of patient safety. The purpose of all safety measures is to improve care and prevent safety events; this can be achieved by different means. If the overall goal of measuring patient safety is to capture the universe of safety events that occur, then broader measures encompassing large populations, such as those based on administrative data, may be preferable. Acknowledging the trade-off between comprehensiveness and accuracy, such measures may be better suited for surveillance and quality improvement (QI), rather than public reporting/reimbursement. Conversely, using measures for public reporting and pay-for-performance requires more narrowly focused measures that favour accuracy over comprehensiveness, such as those with restricted denominators or those based on medical record review.
A patient safety alert has been issued by NHS England to raise awareness of the importance of taking, recording and responding to vital signs where restraint has been used to manage a person’s behaviour if they are at risk to themselves or others.
Four evidence reviews written to support work NICE carried out on staffing levels in the NHS have been released. Under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the documents had been withheld to give NHS Improvement time to study them in their new remit to consider service improvement. The release of the documents follows an internal review of the FOI decision.
In 2013 the Francis and Berwick reports, published in the wake of care failings at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, identified NICE as a key player to help advise the NHS on staffing levels. The Department of Health and NHS England asked NICE to begin work developing evidence based guidelines focusing on nursing care, one of the main drivers of patient safety.
Two £25 vouchers are up for grabs in the library’s ‘Making the Most of Information’ survey.
To take part, just visit http://goo.gl/AdN4ok by Friday 19th February.
Two nurses from Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have led an innovative project that is putting information on ‘hot topics’ relating to quality and safety literally at the fingertips of nurses, midwives and nursing assistants.
Health information technology (health IT) has potential to improve patient safety but its implementation and use has led to unintended consequences and new safety concerns. A key challenge to improving safety in health IT-enabled healthcare systems is to develop valid, feasible strategies to measure safety concerns at the intersection of health IT and patient safety. In response to the fundamental conceptual and methodological gaps related to both defining and measuring health IT-related patient safety, we propose a new framework, the Health IT Safety (HITS) measurement framework, to provide a conceptual foundation for health IT-related patient safety measurement, monitoring, and improvement.....To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
The first national, integrated whistleblowing policy has been published by NHS Improvement and NHS England, with the aims of standardising the way that staff are supported to raise concerns within NHS organisations.
Its release follows a public consultation on the draft policy, held throughout November 2015.
We're looking at how NHS acute, community healthcare and mental health trusts investigate deaths and learn from their investigations. We also want to assess whether opportunities to prevent deaths have been missed.