Reviewing Year One of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy
The NHS has recently published its report on the first year of implementation of its Patient Safety Strategy. How does it view the achievements of the past year in enhancing patient safety within the NHS?
NHS Patient Safety Strategy 2019
The strategy, planning how to improve patient safety across the NHS over the next five to ten years, recognised that getting it right could save both lives and money:
'Getting this right could save almost 1,000 extra lives and £100 million in care costs each year from 2023/24. The potential exists to reduce claims provision by around £750 million per year by 2025.'
Its strategy to improving patient safety in the NHS adopted a three-pronged approach, looking to address both culture and systems,:
- Improving understanding of safety (Insight)
- Equipping patients, staff and partners with the skills and opportunities to improve patient safety throughout the whole system (Involvement)
- Designing and supporting programmes that deliver effective and sustainable change in the most important areas (Improvement)
The ways in which these outcomes would be achieved would involve a wide variety of actions, including the following:
- Adopt safety measurement principles to better understand how safe care is
- Introduce a new safety learning system to support learning from what does and does not go well
- Introduce the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework to improve the response to patient safety incidents
- Implement a new medical examiner system to scrutinise deaths
- Share insight from litigation to prevent harm
- Establish principles and expectations for the involvement of patients, families, carers and others in providing safer care
- Establish patient safety specialists to lead safety improvement
- Delivery the National Patient Safety Improvement programme
- Deliver the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme
- Develop the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme
- Deliver a Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme
At the end of Year One
Any assessment of change or improvement in the NHS has to acknowledge the profound impact of COVID-19 and the challenges that it has created for the health service.
Nonetheless, the report published in the autumn of 2020 was able to identify areas of progress and improvement in key objectives including the following:
- A new Patient Safety Measurement Unit has been established, encouraging patient safety data sharing
- A Faculty of Learning website has been developed to share learning from NHS Resolution claims
- The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework was introduced in March 2020 and is being tested by a number of varied health service organisations across England
- A draft Patient Safety Partners Framework has been published and is in consultation
- All 134 maternity and neonatal care providers engaged with the Safety Improvement Programme
- 500 national stakeholders have been involved with the Medicines Safety Improvement Programme to generate ideas and identify priorities
The report looks to the future and its plans for the next year which include the introduction of patient safety specialists, patient safety partners and the Patient Safety Incident management System.
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