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.
CQC is carrying out a review of how NHS trusts identify, report, investigate and learn from deaths of people using their services.
This follows a request from the Secretary of State for Health, which was part of the Government’s response to a report into the deaths of people with a learning disability or mental health problem in contact with Southern Health Foundation NHS foundation Trust.
CQC’s review will consider the quality of practice in relation to identifying, reporting and investigating the death of any person in contact with a health service managed by an NHS trust; whether the person is in hospital, receiving care in a community setting or living in their own home. The review will pay particular attention to how NHS trusts investigate and learn from deaths of people with a learning disability or mental health problem.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
‘Responding to Concerns’, is a new educational film developed by Health Education England that aims to improve patient safety. Developed with input from patient safety experts, including our raising concerns network, the film aims to equip staff with the knowledge, skills and confidence to adequately and safely respond to patient safety concerns.
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.
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.
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.
We're currently making some changes in the background of our email updates to solve some problems we've been having recently. During our testing phase this may automatically generate some alerts, which will show below, but you can ignore these! If all goes according to plan we will be resuming normal service in the next week…