This week is Patient Safety Awareness Week, an annual campaign from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). This well-respected world-wide initiative underpins much of the work we deliver through our Patient Safety Collaborative, to improve people’s safety when they use health and care services.

It seems obvious that we should all aspire to deliver safer care, but is not necessarily simple to achieve. Safety for staff and those who receive care is dependent on a number of factors including the use of clear, evidence-based practice and processes, as well as positive safety culture and learning environment.

Barriers can come from many places: misunderstood communication, unhelpful culture, or increasing demands on staff time, which reduce the time to learn and consider what could be improved.

The East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (EMPSC) has plenty of experience working with health and social care organisations. We help them enhance safe, quality care and navigate obstacles, often with impressive results from teams who focus on a common problem and make measurable improvement.

The EMPSC also delivers the National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes, commissioned by NHS England and NHS Improvement. This includes five specific safety programmes and uses the IHI’s Model for Improvement as the framework to guide improvement work. You can read more about the national programmes and what we’re doing in the East Midlands here. These are some examples of how our work is making a difference:

• The EMPSC has received £20,000 from the Health Foundation to develop quality improvement resources, working with care homes. Based on the popular React To series, the aim is to build confidence and knowledge in care home staff who want to test their ideas for quality improvement.
• We’ve recently recruited seven members of the public to get involved with shaping the delivery of the Mental Health and Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programmes. They are already having an impact, using their lived experience, views and knowledge to support and inform our approach.
• We’re working with five mental health trusts and two private providers to reduce the incidence of restrictive practice in in-patient wards, building upon a benchmarking report the EMPSC published last year. This includes 24 wards spanning 11 different specialities.
• Our maternity and neonatal support has been focusing on the optimisation and stabilisation of pre-term babies, and increasing the number of smoke-free pregnancies. We’ve brought over 100 people together through action learning groups and working in partnership to grow joint networks with our colleagues in West Midlands PSC. To support staff resilience and health and wellbeing, we compiled a pack of useful resources and held an ‘Art of Being Brilliant’ workshop.
• Opioids are high risk medications that have the potential to cause severe patient harm. Improving chronic pain management by reducing harm from opioids is a national priority. Last year we scoped and reported on the effective opioid interventions across the East Midlands. This information has supported the creation of a whole-system approach that we are currently implementing.
• We are working with councils and health colleagues in the East and West Midlands, as well as people living with learning disabilities and their families in response to the LeDeR (Learning Disability Mortality Review) report. The report highlights poor health outcomes experienced by some people with learning disabilities, and this pilot programme is testing to test and trial tools, tech and processes that can identify the signs of health deterioration early and support a safe and timely response, to enable best health outcomes.
• We have been working with 16 care homes across the East Midlands to co-produce and test interventions to reduce medication administration errors. These interventions included ‘learning through events’ and ‘safety huddles’. We also trained 12 medicines safety champions, through a series of workshops on quality improvement and human factors.
• Managers of 105 care homes across the East Midlands completed a survey on managing frailty and deterioration, and care planning, which has given valuable insight into how they support the care of residents in anticipation of and during times when they become unwell.
• The EMPSC is supporting three hospital sites in the East Midlands to take part in a national study to standardise the management of sudden physical health deterioration in children, using a Paediatric Early Warning System (PEWS).
• Our popular ‘Connecting Together’ webinars for care homes are held quarterly and are a brilliant way for care professionals to come together and celebrate their work. Our next webinar on 6 April is about ‘How we care’ and will feature our first ever East Midlands Care Home Awards. Find out more and how to make a nomination here.
• We offered fifteen fully-funded places to join a ‘Developing Improvement Leaders’ programme, which have been taken up by people working in management or leadership roles in 12 health and care organisations. The programme supports leaders who drive safety and improvement while maintaining a full-time role elsewhere in the system. It provides a forum for sharing experiences, learning and ideas. The programme started in January 2022 and participants have given positive feedback.

I am proud of our small team of improvement experts, who champion patient and resident safety daily. This brief summary just scratches the surface of the impact they are having in the East Midlands. You can read more about their fantastic work in our latest Patient Safety Collaborative newsletter. If you would like more information, email the team at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.