It’s world patient safety day on Sunday 17 September, and this year’s theme – engaging patients for patient safety – will focus on the crucial role patients, families and carers play in the safety of health care.
Evidence shows that when patients are treated as partners in their care, significant gains are made in safety, patient satisfaction and health outcomes. Through the slogan “elevate the voice of patients,” the World Health Organisation (WHO) is calling on health partners to introduce policy and continue to implement plans that focusses on patients becoming active partners in their own health care journey. This call to arms is in-line with the changes we are making to strengthen patients voices by including them in our safety reviews as part of our new patient safety incident reporting framework (PSIRF), which we are introducing early next year. Please watch this video recorded earlier this year by our deputy chief nurse Nicola McMinn on patient safety.
Maria Patterson, who joined us this week as our new associate director of patient safety and quality said: “Keeping our people and the patients we care for safe is at the heart of what we do.
“We are transforming our approach to patient safety with the sole aim of providing better health and care for all. We need to ensure our people and volunteers are working together to create a safe environment for people to receive care and for people to work, and we will shortly be looking to create new patient safety partner roles (PSPs) to help us achieve our aim. We will seek to ensure that patients and staff who have been involved in patient safety events have the opportunity to contribute to inform learning to ensure we reduce the risk similar harm happening to someone else.
“We are also working closely with Healthwatch to ensure we are putting our patients, their families and carers at the very fore of all we do. We will share more information about the future PSPs role as soon as we can.”
NHS England has created this short video which helps encourage patients to play a greater role in hospital stay with a few simple steps. It has also created some excellent bitesize videos and a podcast which we encourage you to watch and listen to. Finally, if you are on X (the new name for Twitter), please follow our national patient safety team’s account @ptsafetyNHS.
Patient Safety within Torbay
While Sunday 17 September is World Patient Day, we are continually supporting and developing our approach to patient safety to ensure we provide a compassionate care service that meets the needs of our patients, their loved ones and carers.
We can only achieve this by creating a safe, just learning culture at work where you feel safe, healthy and supported, and are able to speak out if you see or hear something which will cause someone harm, and don’t feel blamed during reviews and use them as opportunities to learn from.
“What you tell us will help us to improve the way we work, the culture we work in, and reduce the number of patient safety incidents. Please speak up if you feel something is wrong.”
Raising concerns
We all share a responsibility to the people in our care and to each other. We want you to feel safe and confident to speak up if you feel that something is wrong.
We all have a responsibility to keep people safe, and you can raise a concern with your line manager or your lead clinician if you see or hear something that may cause harm. You can also email our freedom to speak up guardian tsdft.guardian@nhs.net or raise a concern anonymously on our online platform WorkInConfidence.
Speak Up Direct provides free, independent, confidential advice on the speaking up process for NHS and social care staff –its helpline is available Monday to Friday 8am-6pm. Call 08000 724725.
Support and further information.
Support is available if you feel affected by something that has happened at work. Our employee assistance programme provides 24/7 help for anyone who needs it for issues either related directly to work, or in your personal life. You can call 0800 031 4674 or visit www.devonwellbeinghub.nhs.uk. You can also contact our health and wellbeing team at tsdft.wellbeing@nhs.net.
Read our Patient Safety newsletter.
More on this global scheme can be found here on the WHO website.
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