I was at the national launch of the 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives on Tuesday 14th - a London hotel ballroom rammed full of people waiting to hear from some experts on patient safety and share their ideas with each other. It started well with a panel of experts by experience and the acknowledgement that speaking out as a patient takes courage and often leads to labelling the patient as "difficult" and even leads to staff avoiding that person. Later on in one of the concurrent sessions I heard some more important messages on whether we really DO place the patient at the centre or is it much more about " .... patient safety until we need the bed " - a fair weather commitment to patient safety?
EMAHSN has decided that it is important to demonstrate the leadership (not just the involvement) that patients offer.  The creation of our Patient and Pubic Involvement Senate is critical to all of our work, and safety as a part of that. Watch this space for an introduction to this amazing group of men and women!

"People follow what you do rather than what you say"

In the afternoon, Sir Bruce Keogh reinforced that it is leadership rather than regulation that ensures quality- and ambition and professionalism at the core of that leadership. This is heartening news as we have placed a specific emphasis in EMAHSN on leadership, and modelling the behaviour within our organisation we hope to support, indeed engender, in others. If we operate in a burdensome, bureaucratic way how can we really encourage the spread and adoption of innovation?

So it's an exciting time as we launch our patient safety collaborative in the East Midlands - we recognise that in order to achieve patient safety you have to have staff safety - and the investment in staff in the East Midlands will be critical to our success. Working with other partners, for example, Health Education East Midlands will give us the best chance of success.