Patient Safety
We will continuously improve patient safety, building on the foundations of a safer culture and safer systems.
The NHS Patient Safety Strategy
Patient safety is about maximising the things that go right and minimising the things that go wrong. It is integral to our definition of quality in healthcare, alongside effectiveness and patient experience.
We are committed to ensuring our strategy remains focused on activity that will have the greatest impact on patient safety improvement.
Our approach to Patient Safety
We are working with our partners to develop our patient safety initiatives and to address the NHS Patient strategy.
We have:
- A framework for involving patients in patient safety.
- A Patient Safety Incident Management System recording patient safety events to ensure learning and regulatory obligations are met.
- Patient Safety Specialists – we take part in the patient safety specialists’ initiative that will see NHS organisations identifying at least one member of staff to the role of their patient safety specialist, to oversee and support patient safety activities across their organisation.
- We have a Patient Safety Incident Response Framework.
- We respond to national patient safety alerts.
- We have Executive leads overseeing patient safety work streams and safer care programmes in place.
Patient Safety Incident Response Plan
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) sets out the NHS’s approach to developing and maintaining effective systems and processes for responding to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improving patient safety.
This Patient Safety Incident Response Plan (PSIRP) sets out how Tameside and Glossop Integrated Care Foundation Trust intends to respond to patient safety incidents going forward.
PSIRF is a whole system change to how we think and respond when an incident happens to prevent recurrence. Previous frameworks have described when and how to investigate a serious incident; PSIRF supports the organisation to focus on learning and improvement within a fostered patient safety culture in which people feel safe to talk and safe to report whilst supporting a systematic, compassionate and proficient response to patient safety incidents; anchored in the principles of openness, fair accountability, learning and continuous improvement.
We have a commitment to learn and promise to act by using quality improvement methodologies and approaches to design as well as implement pathway and system change. We use frameworks to measure and monitor safety. We will continue to adopt a trust wide approach to quality improvement across the organisation developing the capability of staff to develop skills, as important as clinical skills, to lead change, using the model for improvement methodology.
