#CAAW24: Patient Safety resources published

Published: 24 Jun 2024

📢 As part of Clinical Audit Awareness Week 2024, designed to highlight the value of clinical audit and quality improvement in enhancing patient outcomes, we are pleased to share a range of valuable resources from HQIP, the clinical audit community, and the broader healthcare sector, focusing on Patient safety:

  • The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) is a new approach to responding to patient safety incidents and a major step towards establishing a safety management system across the NHS. This is mandatory for services provided under the NHS Standard Contract including acute, ambulance, mental health, and community healthcare providers. To help organisations prepare transition to PSIRF, a preparation guide has been developed.
  • Case studies show the direct action taken in response to patient safety events recorded by organisations, staff and the public, and how their actions support the NHS to protect patients from harm. One example, from NHS England, of direct action is how the retained surgical instrumentation and complex procedures involving multiple teams and equipment lead to the development of NatSSIPs2.
  • National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures (NatSSIPS) are intended to enable safe, reliable and efficient care to every patient having an invasive procedure. A NatSSIPS summary and infographic have also been developed to distribute within trusts. NatSSIPs now recommends that Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) or Local Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures (LocSSIPs) be developed locally, based on NatSSIPs 2. Checklists are the recommended tool to support teams in following the NatSSIPs and LocSSIPs, and to support team behaviours. However, checklists alone are not a solution in themselves and are dependent on the system and culture in which they are used.
  • Article: In Safety in Numbers, Tina Strack, Associate Director for Quality and Development (NCAPOP) at HQIP, explores the importance of taking a holistic, evidence-based approach to patient safety – Cornerstone2023.pdf (article on pages 7-9).
  • Webinar: Patients and PSIRF: Changing culture (rcp.ac.uk) – in the webinar, experts from the Royal College of Physicians discuss how the patient safety incident response framework (PSIRF) is changing the culture amongst healthcare workers and what this means for individuals.
  • Guidance to support root-cause analysis (used in local patient safety investigation) can be found in A guide to quality improvement tools.

Note that this list is intended to signpost to relevant useful resources but, for those published outside of HQIP, we are unable to take responsibility for them – please contact the provider direct if you have any questions.