Posted by Devon Partnership Trust in News on 13th September, 2019
Today is World Patient Safety Day. No one should be harmed in health care. And yet, every day, thousands of patients suffer avoidable harm while receiving care. If you are a doctor, nurse, pharmacist or health worker, engage patients as partners in their care. Work with the patient to create an open and transparent patient safety culture. Encourage blame-free reporting and learning from errors. Speak up for patient safety.
Better incident reporting and response could save an extra 160 lives and £13.5 million. If boosting patient safety understanding and capability reduces harm by a modest 2%, an extra 200 lives and £20 million could be saved. Patient safety is about maximising the things that go right and minimising the things that go wrong for people experiencing healthcare. It is integral to the NHS’s definition of quality in healthcare, alongside effectiveness and patient experience. Read the NHS Patient Safety Strategy here.
Melanie Walker, Chief Executive says: "Patient safety is at the heart of everything we do. It is one of the golden threads that runs through every aspect of our work. We know that our staff are passionate about delivering high quality, safe care that delivers the best outcomes for people. We would like to use today to invite staff to share all the fantastic work within their teams to strive for improvement and excellence in safety."
We have an active programme of quality improvement and patient safety which many staff are involved in ranging from work to reduce unnecessary waits in our services, improving care records management, learning from incidents and listening and responding to those who use our services and their families and carers. We have set out our QI Patient safety priorities, namely: