A national programme to improve the safety of patients and ensure the health service continues to learn has been launched by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt.
NHS England and NHS Improving Quality (NHS IQ) are co-ordinating a network of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives, each led by an Academic Health Science Network.
A national programme to improve the safety of patients and ensure the health service continues to learn has been launched by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt.
NHS England and NHS Improving Quality (NHS IQ) are co-ordinating a network of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives, each led by an Academic Health Science Network.
Each Collaborative will be funded for the next five years by NHS England and will support individuals, teams and organisations to build skills and knowledge about patient safety and quality improvement to create space and time to work on the challenges, and provide opportunities to learn from each other.
The groups will have a focus on improving safety and empowering patients, carers and staff to highlight, challenge and implement local improvements in patient care. AHSNs provide a unique combination of NHS, academia, third sector and industry partners and work across defined geographical areas.
Patients and healthcare staff will be working together to determine their local patient safety priorities and to develop and implement solutions to these problems.
Some of the issues that the Collaboratives may tackle on a ‘whole patient pathway’ basis include:
– Reducing infections.
– Pressure ulcers.
– Medication safety.
– Falls.
– Problems with patient transfers and discharge.
Dr Mike Durkin, NHS England Director of Patient Safety, said: “Having worked closely with Don Berwick and his advisory group it is fantastic to see the collaboratives about to begin work on what will be the biggest patient safety initiative in the history of the NHS. They will invigorate Don Berwick’s vision of bringing people together at every level, from the patient to the surgeon and the GP to the chief executive, to rapidly accelerate safety improvements in every healthcare setting on both a local and national level.”
Steve Fairman, NHS Improving Quality Managing Director, added: “Within NHS Improving Quality we have the knowledge, skills and expertise of collaborative working from previous successful clinical collaboratives. This will be powerful when combined with the specialist knowledge on safety priority improvements in NHS England and the local dimension brought by the AHSNs to this work. We look forward to working with and supporting them to share the learning and good practice nationally."
Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt said: “We have focused unprecedented attention on improving patient safety in the NHS, but there’s always more to do and these collaboratives will help drive standards even higher. The collaboratives also support our Sign up to Safety campaign, which sets out our ambition to halve avoidable harm over the next three years and save up to 6,000 lives. ”
The programme is aligned with and supports the ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign to make the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world by creating the culture to support a system devoted to continuous learning and improvement."
